vir.ff  fa  ■■«& 


A  HISTORY  OF, ENGLISH 
ROMANTICISM  IN  THE 
NINETEENTH  CENTURY, 


BY 

HENRY  A.  BEERS 

Author  of  1<A  Suburban  Pastoral,"  "The  Ways  o/YaU^etc. 

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OFTH?     r 

I  UNn;           y  | 

NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 
1901 


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ROMANCE. 

My  love  dwelt  in  a  Northern  land. 

A  gray  tower  in  a  forest  green 
Was  hers,  and  far  on  either  hand 

The  long  wash  of  the  waves  was  seen, 
And  leagues  on  leagues  of  yellow  sand, 

The  woven  forest  boughs  between. 

And  through  the  silver  Northern  light 

The  sunset  slowly  died  away, 
And  herds  of  strange  deer,  lily-white, 

Stole  forth  among  the  branches  grey  ; 
About  the  coming  of  the  light, 

They  fled  like  ghosts  before  the  day. 

I  know  not  if  the  forest  green 

Still  girdles  round  that  castle  grey ; 

I  know  not  if  the  boughs  between 
The  white  deer  vanish  ere  the  day ; 

Above  my  love  the  grass  is  green, 
My  heart  is  colder  than  the  clay. 

ANDREW  LANG. 


MQfflTX 


Copyright,  1901, 

BY 

HENRY  HOLT  &  CO. 


Published  November,  igoi 


PREFACE. 


The  present  volume  is  a  sequel  to  "  A  History  of  Eng- 
lish Romanticism  in  the  Eighteenth  Century"  (New 
York:  Henry  Holt  &  Co.,  1899).  References  in  the 
footnotes  to  "  Volume  I."  are  to  that  work.  The  difficul- 
ties of  this  second  part  of  my  undertaking  have  been  of 
a  kind  just  opposite  to  those  of  the  first.  As  it  concerns 
my  subject,  the  eighteenth  century  was  an  age  of  begin- 
nings; and  the  problem  was  to  discover  what  latent  ro- 
manticism existed  in  the  writings  of  a  period  whose  spirit, 
upon  the  whole,  was  distinctly  unromantic.  But  the  tem- 
per of  the  nineteenth  century  has  been,  until  recent  years, 
prevailingly  romantic  in  the  wider  meaning  of  the  word. 
And  as  to  the  more  restricted  sense  in  which  I  have 
chosen  to  employ  it,  the  mediaevalising  literature  of  the 
nineteenth  century  is  at  least  twenty  times  as  great  as 
that  of  the  eighteenth,  both  in  bulk  and  in  value.  Ac- 
cordingly the  problem  here  is  one  of  selection ;  and  of 
selection  not  from  a  list  of  half-forgotten  names,  like 
Warton  and  Hurd,  but  from  authors  whose  work  is  still 
the  daily  reading  of  all  educated  readers. 

As  I  had  anticipated,  objection  has  been  made  to  the 
narrowness  of  my  definition  of  romanticism.  But  every 
writer  has  a  right  to  make  his  own  definitions;  or,  at 
least,  to  say  what  his  book  shall  be  about.     I  have  not 


vi  Preface. 

written  a  history  of  the  "  liberal  movement  in  English 
literature  " ;  nor  of  the  "  renaissance  of  wonder  "  j  nor  of 
the  "  emancipation  of  the  ego."  Why  not  have  called  the 
book,  then,  "  A  History  of  the  Mediaeval  Revival  in  Eng- 
land "  ?  Because  I  have  a  clear  title  to  the  use  of  ro- 
mantic in  one  of  its  commonest  acceptations ;  and,  for  my- 
self, I  prefer  the  simple  dictionary  definition,  "pertaining 
to  the  style  of  the  Christian  and  popular  literature  of  the 
Middle  Ages,"  to  any  of  those  more  pretentious  explana- 
tions which  seek  to  express  the  true  inwardness  of  ro- 
mantic literature  by  analysing  it  into  its  elements,  select- 
ing one  of  these  elements  as  essential,  and  rejecting  all 
the  rest  as  accidental. 

M.  Brunetiere,  for  instance,  identifies  romanticism  with 
lyricism.  It  is  the  "emancipation  of  the  ego."  This 
formula  is  made  to  fit  Victor  Hugo,  and  it  will  fit  Byron. 
But  M.  Brunetiere  would  surely  not  deny  that  Walter 
Scott's  work  is  objective  and  dramatic  quite  as  often  as 
it  is  lyrical.  Yet  what  Englishman  will  be  satisfied  with 
a  definition  of  romantic  which  excludes  Scott?  Indeed, 
M.  Brunetiere  himself  is  respectful  to  the  traditional 
meaning  of  the  Word.  "Numerous  definitions,"  he  says, 
"have  been  given  of  Romanticism,  and  still  others  are 
continually  being  offered;  and  all,  or  almost  all  of  them, 
contain  a  part  of  the  truth.  Mme.  de  Stael  was  right 
when  she  asserted  in  her  *  Allemagne '  that  Paganism 
and  Christianity,  the  North  and  the  South,  antiquity  and 
the  Middle  Ages,  having  divided  between  them  the  his- 
tory of  literature,  Romanticism  in  consequence,  in  con- 
trast to  Classicism,  was  a  combination  of  chivalry,  the 
Middle  Ages,  the  literatures  of  the  North,  and  Christian- 
ity.    It  should  be  noted,  in  this  connection,  that  some 


Preface.  vii 

thirty  years  later  Heinrich  Heine,  in  the  book  in  which 
he  will  rewrite  Mme.  de  StaeTs,  will  not  give  such  a  very 
different  idea  of  Romanticism."  And  if,  in  an  analysis 
of  the  romantic  movement  throughout  Europe,  any  single 
element  in  it  can  lay  claim  to  the  leading  place,  that  ele- 
ment seems  to  me  to  be  the  return  of  each  country  to  its 
national  past;  in  other  words,  mediaevalism. 

A  definition  loses  its  usefulness  when  it  is  made  to 
connote  too  much.  Professor  Herford  says  that  the 
"  organising  conception  "  of  his  "  Age  of  Wordsworth  " 
is  romanticism.  But  if  Cowper  and  Wordsworth  and 
Shelley  are  romantic,  then  almost  all  the  literature  of  the 
years  1 798-1830  is  romantic.  I  prefer  to  think  of  Cow- 
per as  a  naturalist,  of  Shelley  as  an  idealist,  and  of 
Wordsworth  as  a  transcendental  realist,  and  to  reserve 
the  name  romanticist  for  writers  like  Scott,  Coleridge, 
and  Keats;  and  I  think  the  distinction  a  serviceable 
one.  Again,  I  have  been  censured  for  omitting  Blake 
from  my  former  volume.  The  omission  was  deli  berate, 
not  accidental,  and  the  grounds  for  it  were  given  in  the 
preface.  Blake  was  not  discovered  until  rather  late  in 
the  nineteenth  century.  He  was  not  a  link  in  the  chain 
of  influence  which  I  was  tracing.  I  am  glad  to  find  my 
justification  in  a  passage  of  Mr.  Saintsbury's  "  History 
of  Nineteenth  Century  Literature"  (p.  13):  "Blake  ex- 
ercised on  the  literary  history  of  his  time  no  influence, 
and  occupied  in  it  no  position.  .  .  .  The  public  had 
little  opportunity  of  seeing  his  pictures,  and  less  of 
reading  his  books.  .  .  .  He  was  practically  an  unread 
man." 

But  I  hope  that  this  second  volume  may  make  more 
♦clear  the  unity  of  my  design  and  the  limits  of  my  subject. 


viii  Preface. 

It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  add  that  no  absolute  estimate 
is  attempted  of  the  writers  whose  works  are  described  in 
this  history.     They  are  looked  at  exclusively  from  a  sin- 
gle point  of  view.  H.  A.  B. 
April,  1901. 


r 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

\    I.  Walter  Scott, i 

II.  Coleridge,  Bowles,  and  the  Pope  Controversy,  48 

III.  Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  Dante  Revival,  90 

IV.  The  Romantic  School  in  Germany,    \m     .        .  132 

V.  The  Romantic  Movement  in  France,        .        .  I73 

VI.  Diffused    Romanticism    in   the    Literature   of 

the  Nineteenth  Century,    .        .        .        .227 

VII.  The  Pre-Raphaelites,         r        .        .        .        .        282 

VIII.  Tendencies  and  Results, 352 


A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH 
ROMANTICISM 


CHAPTER   I. 
IWlalter  Scott* 


It  was  reserved  for  Walter  Scott,  "  the  Ariosto  of  the 
North,"  "the  historiographer  royal  of  feudalism,"  to  ac- 
complish the  task  which  his  eighteenth-century  forerun- 
ners had  essayed  in  vain.  He  possessed  the  true  en- 
chanter's wand,  the  historic  imagination.  With  this  in 
his  hand,  he  raised  the  dead  past  to  life,  made  it  once 
more  conceivable,  made  it  even  actual.  Before  Scott  no 
genius  of  the  highest  order  had  lent  itself  wholly  or 
mainly  to  retrospection.  He  is  the  middle  point  and  the 
culmination  of  English  romanticism.  His  name  is,  all 
in  all,  the  most  important  on  our  list.  "  Towards  him  all 
the  lines  of  the  romantic  revival  converge."!  The  popu- 
lar ballad,  the  Gothic  romance,  the  Ossianic  poetry,  the 

*  Scott's  translations  from  the  German  are  considered  in 
the  author's  earlier  volume,  "A  History  of  English  Romanti- 
cism in  the  Eighteenth  Century. "  Incidental  mention  of  Scott 
occurs  throughout  the  same  volume  ;  and  a  few  of  the  things 
there  said  are  repeated,  in  substance  though  not  in  form,  in 
the  present  chapter.  It  seemed  better  to  risk  some  repetition 
than  to  sacrifice  fulness  of  treatment  here. 

f  "The  Development  of  the  English  Novel,"  by  Wilbur  L. 
Cross,  p.  131. 


2  <>A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

new  German  literature,  the  Scandinavian  discoveries, 
these  and  other  scattered  rays  of  influence  reach  a  focus 
in  Scott.  It  is  true  that  his  delineation  of  feudal  society 
is  not  final.  There  were  sides  of  mediaeval  life  which  he 
did  not  know,  or  understand,  or  sympathize  with,  and 
some  of  these  have  been  painted  in  by  later  artists.  That 
his  pictures  have  a  coloring  of  modern  sentiment  is  no 
arraignment  of  him  but  of  the  genre.  All  romanticists 
are  resurrectionists;  their  art  is  an  elaborate  make-be- 
lieve. It  is  enough  for  their  purpose  if  the  world  which 
they  re-create  has  the  look  of  reality,  the  verisimile  if  not 
the  vertim.  That  Scott's  genius  was  in  extenso  rather 
than  in  intenso ;  that  his  work  is  largely  improvisation; 
that  he  was  not  a  miniature,  but  a  distemper  painter, 
splashing  large  canvasses  with  a  coarse  brush  and  gaudy 
pigments,  all  these  are  commonplaces  of  criticism.  Scott's 
handling  was  broad,  vigorous,  easy,  careless,  healthy,  free. 
I  He  was  never  subtle,  morbid,  or  fantastic,  and  had  no 
niceties  or  secrets.  He  was,  as  Coleridge  said  of  Schil- 
ler, "master,  not  of  the  intense  drama  of  passion,  but  the 
diffused  drama  of  history."  Therefore,  because  his  qual- 
ities were  popular  and  his  appeal  was  made  to  the  people, 
the  general  reader,  he  won  a  hearing  for  his  cause,  which 
Coleridge  or  Keats  or  Tieck,  with  his  closer  workman- 
ship, could  never  have  won.  He  first  and  he  alone  popu- 
larised romance.  No  literature  dealing  with  the  feudal 
past  has  ever  had  the  currency  and  the  universal  success 
of  Scott's.  At  no  time  has  mediaevalism  held  so  large  a 
place  in  comparison  with  other  literary  interests  as  dur- 
ing the  years  of  his  greatest  vogue,  say  from  1805  to  1830. 
The  first  point  to  be  noticed  about  Scott  is  the  thor- 
oughness of  his  equipment.     While  never  a  scholar  in 


Walter  Scott.  3 

the  academic  sense,  he  was,  along  certain  chosen  lines, 
a  really  learned  man.  He  was  thirty-four  when  he  pub- 
lished "The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel"  (1805),  the 
first  of  his  series  of  metrical  romances  and  the  first  of  his 
poems  to  gain  popular  favour.  But  for  twenty  years  he 
had  been  storing  his  mind  with  the  history,  legends,  and 
ballad  poetry  of  the  Scottish  border,  and  was  already  a 
finished  antiquarian.  The  bent  and  limitations  of  his 
genius  were  early  determined,  and  it  remained  to  the  end 
wonderfully  constant  to  its  object.  At  the  age  of  twelve 
he  had  begun  a  collection  of  manuscript  ballads.  His 
education  in  romance  dated  from  the  cradle.  His  lulla- 
bies were  Jacobite  songs ;  his  grandmother  told  him  tales 
of  moss-troopers,  and  his  Aunt  Janet  read  him  ballads 
from  Ramsay's  "  Tea-table  Miscellany,"  upon  which  his 
quick  and  tenacious  memory  fastened  eagerly.  The  bal- 
lad of  "  Hardiknute,"  in  this  collection,  he  knew  by  heart 
before  he  could  read.  "  It  was  the  first  poem  I  ever 
learnt — the  last  I  shall  ever  forget."  Dr.  Blacklock  in- 
troduced the  young  schoolboy  to  the  poems  of  Ossian  and 
of  Spenser,  and  he  committed  to  memory  "whole  duans 
of  the  one  and  cantos  of  the  other."  "  Spenser,"  he  says, 
"  I  could  have  read  forever.  Too  young  to  trouble  myself 
about  the  allegory,  I  considered  all  the  knights  and  ladies 
and  dragons  and  giants  in  their  outward  and  exoteric 
sense,  and  God  only  knows  how  delighted  I  was  to  find 
myself  in  such  society."  A  little  later  Percy's  "Rel- 
iques  "  fell  into  his  hands,  with  results  that  have  already 
been  described.* 

As  soon  as  he  got  access  to  the  circulating  library  in 
Edinburgh,  he  began  to  devour  its  works  of  fiction,  char- 
*  Vol.  i.,  p%  300. 


4  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

acteristically  rejecting  love  stories  and  domestic  tales, 
but  laying  hold  upon  "  all  that  was  adventurous  and  ro- 
mantic," and  in  particular  upon  "everything  which 
touched  on  knight-errantry."  For  two  or  three  years  he 
used  to  spend  his  holidays  with  his  schoolmate,  John 
Irving,  on  Arthur's  Seat  or  Salisbury  Crags,  where  they 
read  together  books  like  "  The  Castle  of  Otranto "  and 
the  poems  of  Spenser  and  Ariosto;  or  composed  and  nar- 
rated to  each  other  "  interminable  tales  of  battles  and 
enchantments"  and  "legends  in  which  the  martial  and 
the  miraculous  always  predominated."  The  education  of 
Edward  Waverley,  as  described  in  the  third  chapter  of 
Scott's  first  novel,  was  confessedly  the  novelist's  own 
education.  In  the  "  large  Gothic  room  "  which  was  the 
library  of  Waverley  Honour,  the  young  book-worm  pored 
over  "  old  historical  chronicles  "  and  the  writings  of  Pulci, 
Froissart,  Brantome,  and  De  la  Noue ;  and  became  "  well 
acquainted  with  Spenser,  Drayton,  and  other  poets  who 
have  exercised  themselves  on  romantic  fiction — of  all 
themes  the  most  fascinating  to  a  youthful  imagination." 

Yet  even  thus  early,  a  certain  solidity  was  apparent  in 
Scott's  studies.  "  To  the  romances  and  poetry  which  I 
chiefly  delighted  in,"  he  writes, "  I  had  always  added  the 
study  of  history,  especially  as  connected  with  military 
events."  He  interested  himself,  for  example,  in  the  art 
of  fortification ;  and  when  confined  to  his  bed  by  a  child- 
ish illness,  found  amusement  in  modelling  fortresses  and 
"  arranging  shells  and  seeds  and  pebbles  so  as  to  repre- 
sent encountering  armies.  ...  I  fought  my  way  thus 
through  Vertot's  *  Knights  of  Malta ' — a  book  which,  as 
it  hovered  between  history  and  romance,  was  exceedingly 
dear  to  me." 


Walter  Scott.  5 

Every  genius  is  self-educated,  and  we  find  Scott  from 
the  first  making  instinctive  selections  and  rejections 
among  the  various  kinds  of  knowledge  offered  him.  At 
school  he  would  learn  no  Greek,  and  wrote  a  theme  in 
which  he  maintained,  to  the  wrath  of  his  teacher,  that 
Ariosto  was  a  better  poet  than  Homer.  In  later  life  he 
declared  that  he  had  forgotten  even  the  letters  of  the 
Greek  alphabet.  Latin  would  have  fared  as  badly,  had 
not  his  interest  in  Matthew  Paris  and  other  monkish 
chroniclers  "kept  up  a  kind  of  familiarity  with  the  lan- 
guage even  in  its  rudest  state."  "  To  my  Gothic  ear,  the 
*  Stabat  Mater/  the  *  Dies  Irae,'  *  and  some  of  the  other 
hymns  of  the  Catholic  Church  are  more  solemn  and  af- 
fecting than  the  fine  classical  poetry  of  Buchanan."  In 
our  examination  of  Scott's  early  translations  from  the 
German,f  it  has  been  noticed  how  exclusively  he  was  at- 
tracted by  the  romantic  department  of  that  literature, 
passing  over,  for  instance,  Goethe's  maturer  work,  to  fix 
upon  his  juvenile  drama  "Gotz  von  Berlichingen." 
Similarly  he  learned  Italian  just  to  read  in  the  original 
the  romantic  poets  Tasso,  Ariosto,  Boiardo,  and  Pulci. 
When  he  first  went  to  London  in  1 799,  "  his  great  anx- 
iety," reports  Lockhart,  "was  to  examine  the  antiquities 
of  the  Tower  and  Westminster  Abbey,  and  to  make  some 
researches  among  the  MSS.  of  the  British  Museum." 
From  Oxford,  which  he  visited  in  1803,  he  brought  away 
only  "  a  grand  but  indistinct  picture  of  towers  and  chapels 
and  oriels  and  vaulted  halls  " ;  having  met  there  a  recep- 


*  The  sixth  canto  of  the  "  Lay"  closes  with  a  few  lines  trans- 
lated from  the  "  Dies  Irae  "  and  chanted  by  the  monks  in  Mel- 
rose Abbey. 

f  Vol.  i.,  pp.  389-404. 


6  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

tion  which,  as  he  modestly  acknowledges,  "  was  more  than 
such  a  truant  to  the  classic  page  as  myself  was  entitled  to 
expect  at  the  source  of  classic  learning."  Finally,  in  his 
last  illness,  when  sent  to  Rome  to  recover  from  the  effects 
of  a  paralytic  stroke,  his  ruling  passion  was  strong  in 
death.  He  examined  with  eagerness  the  remains  of  the 
mediaeval  city,  but  appeared  quite  indifferent  to  that  older 
Rome  which  speaks  to  the  classical  student.  It  will  be 
remembered  that  just  the  contrary  of  this  was  true  of  Ad- 
dison, when  he  was  in  Italy  a  century  before.*  Scott 
was  at  no  pains  to  deny  or  to  justify  the  one-sidedness  of 
his  culture.  But  when  Erskine  remonstrated  with  him 
for  rambling  on 

"through  brake  and  maze 
With  harpers  rude,  of  barbarous  days, " 

and  urged  him  to  compose  a  regular  epic  on  classical 
lines,  he  good-naturedly  but  resolutely  put  aside  the  ad- 
vice. 

"Nay,  Erskine,  nay — On  the  wild  hill 
Let  the  wild  heath-bell  f  flourish  still  .... 
Though  wild  as  cloud,  as  stream,  as  gale, 
Flow  forth,  flow  unrestrained,  my  tale  !  "  % 

*  Vol.  i.,  pp.  48-49. 

f  "Scott  was  entirely  incapable  of  entering  into  the  spirit 
of  any  classical  scene.  He  was  strictly  a  Goth  and  a  Scot, 
and  his  sphere  of  sensation  may  be  almost  exactly  limited  by 
the  growth  of  heather." — Ruskin,  "Modern  Painters,"  vol. 
iii.,  p.  317. 

%  "  Marmion  "  :  Introduction  to  Canto  third.  In  the  pref- 
ace to  "The  Bridal  of  Triermain,"  the  poet  says :  "According 
to  the  author's  idea  of  Romantic  Poetry,  as  distinguished 
from  Epic,  the  former  comprehends  a  fictitious  narrative, 
framed  and  combined  at  the  pleasure  of  the  writer ;  beginning 
and  ending  as  he  may  judge  best ;  which  neither  exacts  nor 
refuses  the  use  of  supernatural  machinery;  which  is  free 
from  the  technical  rules  of  the  Epee.  ...  In  a  word,  the 
author  is  absolute  master  of  his  country  and  its  inhabitants. " 


Walter  Scott.  7 

Scott's  letters  to  Erskine,  Ellis,  Leyden,  Ritson,  Miss 
Seward,  and  other  literary  correspondents  are  filled  with 
discussions  of  antiquarian  questions  and  the  results  of 
his  favourite  reading  in  old  books  and  manuscripts.  He 
communicates  his  conclusions  on  the  subject  of  "  Arthur 
and  Merlin  "  or  on  the  authorship  of  the  old  metrical  ro- 
mance of  "  Sir  Tristram."  *  He  has  been  copying  manu- 
scripts in  the  Advocates'  Library  at  Edinburgh.  In  179 1 
he  read  papers  before  the  Speculative  Society  on  "  The 
Origin  of  the  Feudal  System,"  "  The  Authenticity  of  Os- 
sian's  Poems,"  "  The  Origin  of  the  Scandinavian  Mythol- 
ogy." Lockhart  describes  two  note-books  in  Scott's  hand- 
writing, with  the  date  1792,  containing  memoranda  of 
ancient  court  records  about  Walter  Scott  and  his  wife, 
Dame  Janet  Beaton,  the  "  Ladye "  of  Branksome  in  the 
"  Lay  " ;  extracts  from  "  Guerin  de  Montglave  " ;  copies 
of  "  Vegtam's  Kvitha  "  and  the  "  Death-Song  of  Regner 
Lodbrog,"  with  Gray's  English  versions ;  Cnut's  verses  on 
passing  Ely  Cathedral;  the  ancient  English  "Cuckoo 
Song,"  and  other  rubbish  of  the  kind.f  When  in  1803 
he  began  to  contribute  articles  to  the  Edinburgh  Review^ 
his  chosen  topics  were  such  as  "  Amadis  of  Gaul,"  Ellis' 

*  Scott's  ascription  of  "Sir  Tristram"  to  Thomas  the 
Rhymer,  or  Thomas  of  Erceldoune,  was  doubtless  a  mistake. 
His  edition  of  the  romance  was  printed  in  1804.  In  1800  he 
had  begun  a  prose  tale,  "Thomas  the  Rhymer,"  a  fragment 
of  which  is  given  in  the  preface  to  the  General  Edition  of 
the  Waverley  Novels  (1829).  This  old  legendary  poet  and 
prophet,  who  flourished  circa  1280,  and  was  believed  to  have 
been  carried  off  by  the  Queen  of  Faerie  into  Eildon  Hill,  fas- 
cinated Scott's  imagination  strongly.  See  his  version  of  the 
"True  Thomas'"  story  in  the  "  Minstrelsy, "  as  also  the  editions 
of  this  very  beautiful  romance  in  Child's  "Ballads,"  in  the 
publications  of  the  E.  E.  Text  So.  ;  and  by  Alois  Brandl,  Ber- 
lin :  1880. 
\  See  vol.  i. ,  p.  390. 


8  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

"Specimens  of  Ancient  English  Poetry,"  Godwin's 
"Chaucer,"  Sibbald's  "Chronicle  of  Scottish  Poetry," 
Evans'  "  Old  Ballads,"  Todd's  "  Spenser,"  "  The  Life  and 
Works  of  Chatterton,"  Southey's  translation  of  "The 
Cid,"  etc. 

Scott's  preparation  for  the  work  which  he  had  to  do 
was  more  than  adequate.  His  reading  along  chosen 
lines  was  probably  more  extensive  and  minute  than  anj 
man's  of  his  generation.  The  introductions  and  notes  to 
his  poems  and  novels  are  even  overburdened  with  learn- 
ing. But  this,  though  important,  Was  but  the  lesser  part 
of  his  advantage.  "The  old-maidenly  genius  of  anti- 
quarianism  "  could  produce  a  Strutt  *  or  even  perhaps  a 
Warton;  but  it  needed  the  touch  of  the  creative  imagi- 
nation to  turn  the  dead  material  of  knowledge  into  works 
of  art  that  have  delighted  millions  of  Teaders  for  a  hun- 
dred years  in  all  civilised  lands  and  tongues. 

The  key  to  Scott's  romanticism  is  his  intense  local 
feeling. f  That  attachment  to  place  which,  in  most  men, 
is  a  sort  of  animal  instinct,  was  with  him  a  passion.  To 
set  the  imagination  at  work  some  emotional  stimulus  is 
required.  The  angry  pride  of  Byron,  Shelley's  revolt 
against  authority,  Keats'  almost  painfully  acute  sensitive- 
ness to  beauty,  supplied  the  nervous  irritation  which  was 
wanting  in  Scott's  slower,  stronger,  and  heavier  tempera- 
ment. The  needed  impetus  came  to  him  from  his  love  of 
country.  Byron  and  Shelley  were  torn  up  by  the  roots 
and  flung  abroad ;    but  Scott  had  struck  his  roots  deep 

*  See  the  General  Preface  to  the  Waverley  Novels  for  some 
remarks  on  "  Queenhoo  Hall "  which  Strutt  began  and  Scott 
completed. 

f  Cf.  vol.  i.,  p.  344. 


Walter  Scott  9 

into  native  soil.  His  absorption  in  the  past  and  rever- 
ence for  everything  that  was  old,  his  conservative  prej- 
udices and  aristocratic  ambitions,  all  had  their  source  in 
this  feeling.  Scott's  Toryism  was  of  a  different  spring 
from  Wordsworth's  and  Coleridge's.  It  was  not  a  reac- 
tion from  disappointed  radicalism;  nor  was  it  the  result 
of  reasoned  conviction.  It  was  inborn  and  was  nursed 
into  a  sentimental  Jacobitism  by  ancestral  traditions  and 
by  an  early  prepossession  in  favour  of  the  Stuarts — a 
Scottish  dynasty — reinforced  by  encounters  with  men  in 
the  Highlands  who  had  been  out  in  the  '45.  It  did  not 
interfere  with  a  practical  loyalty  to  the  reigning  house 
and  with  what  seems  like  a  somewhat  exaggerated  defer- 
ence to  George  IV.  Personally  the  most  modest  of  men, 
he  was  proud  to  trace  his  descent  from  "  auld  Wat  of 
Harden  "  *  and  to  claim  kinship  with  the  bold  Buccleuch. 
He  used  to  make  annual  pilgrimages  to  Harden  Tower, 
"  the  incunabula  of  his  race  " ;  and  "  in  the  earlier  part  of 
his  life,"  says  Lockhart,  "he  had  nearly  availed  himself 
of  his  kinsman's  permission  to  fit  up  the  dilapidated/^/ 
for  his  summer  residence." 

Byron  wrote :  "  I  twine  my  hope  of  being  remembered 
in  my  line  with  my  land's  language."  But  Scott  wished 
to  associate  his  name  with  the  land  itself.  Abbotsford 
was  more  to  him  than  Newstead  could  ever  have  been  to 
Byron;  although  Byron  was  a  peer  and  inherited  his 
domain,  while  Scott  was  a  commoner  and  created  his. 
Too  much  has  been   said  in  condemnation  of  Scott's 


*"I  am  therefore  descended  from  that  ancient  chieftain 
whose  name  I  have  made  to  ring  in  many  a  ditty,  and  from 
his  fair  dame,  the  Flower  of  Yarrow — no  bad  genealogy  for 
a  Border  minstrel." 


io  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

weakness  in  this  respect;  that  his  highest  ambition  was 
to  become  a  laird  and  found  a  family;  that  he  was  more 
gratified  when  the  King  made  him  a  baronet  than  when 
the  public  bought  his  books;  that  the  expenses  of  Ab- 
botsford  and  the  hospitalities  which  he  extended  to  all 
comers  wasted  his  time  and  finally  brought  about  his 
bankruptcy.  Leslie  Stephen  and  others  have  even  made 
merry  over  Scott's  Gothic,*  comparing  his  plaster-of- 
Paris  'scutcheons  and  ceilings  in  imitation  of  carved  oak 
with  the  pinchbeck  architecture  of  Strawberry  Hill,  and 
intimating  that  the  feudalism  in  his  romances  was  only  a 
shade  more  genuine  than  the  feudalism  of  "The  Castle 
of  Otranto."  Scott  was  imprudent;  Abbotsford  was  his 
weakness,  but  it  was  no  ignoble  weakness.  If  the  ideal 
of  the  life  which  he  proposed  to  himself  there  was  scarcely 
a  heroic  one,  neither  was  it  vulgar  or  selfish.  The  artist 
or  the  philosopher  should  perhaps  be  superior  to  the  am- 
bition of  owning  land  and  having  "  a  stake  in  the  coun- 
try," but  the  ambition  is  a  very  human  one  and  has  its 
good  side.  In  Scott  the  desire  was  more  social  than 
personal.  It  was  not  that  title  and  territory  were  feathers 
in  his  cap,  but  that  they  bound  him  more  closely  to  the 
dear  soil  of  Scotland  and  to  the  national,  historic  past. 

The  only  deep  passion  in  Scott's  poetry  is  patriotism, 
the  passion  of  place.  In  his  metrical  romances  the  rush 
of  the  narrative  and  the  vivid,  picturesque  beauty  of  the 


*  4l  He  neither  cared  for  paintingjaor^sculpture,  and  was  to- 
tally incapable  of  forming  a  judgment  about  them.  He  had 
some  confused  love  of  Gothic  architecture  because  it  was  dark, 
picturesque,  old  and  like  nature  ;  but  could  not  tell  the  worst 
from  the  best,  and  built  for  himself  probably  the  most  incon- 
gruous and  ugly  pile  that  gentlemanly  modernism  ever  de- 
vised."— Ruskin,  "Modern  Painters,"  vol.  iii.,  p.  271. 


Walter  Scott  1 1 

descriptions  are  indeed  exciting  to  the  imagination ;  but 
it  is  only  when  the  chord  of  national  feeling  is  touched 
that  the  verse  grows  lyrical,  that  the  heart  is  reached,  and 
that  tears  come  into  the  reader's  eyes,  as  they  must  have 
done  into  the  poet's.  A  dozen  such  passages  occur  at 
once  to  the  memory ;  the  last  stand  of  the  Scottish  nobles 
around  their  king  at  Flodden ;  the  view  of  Edinburgh — 
"  mine  own  romantic  town  " — from  Blackford  Hill : 

"Fitz-Eustace'  heart  felt  closely  pent : 
As  if  to  give  his  rapture  vent, 
The  spur  he  to  his  charger  lent, 

And  raised  his  bridle-hand. 
And,  making  demi-volte  in  air, 
i  Cried,  '  Where's  the  coward  that  would  not  dare 

To  fight  for  such  a  land?'" 

and  the  still  more  familiar  opening  of  the  sixth  canto  in 
the  "  Lay  " — "  Breathes  there  the  man,"  etc. : 

"O  Caledonia  !  stern  and  wild. 
Meet  nurse  for  a  poetic  child  ! 
Land  of  brown  heath  and  shaggy  wood, 
Land  of  the  mountain  and  the  flood, 
Land  of  my  sires  !  what  mortal  hand 
Can  e'er  untie  the  filial  band 
That  knits  me  to  thy  rugged  strand  ?  " 

In  such  a  mood  geography  becomes  poetry  and  names 
are  music*  Scott  said  to  Washington  Irving  that  if  he 
did  not  see  the  heather  at  least  once  a  year,  he  thought 
he  would  die. 

Lockhart  tells  how  the  sound  that  he  loved  best  of  all 
sounds  was  in  his  dying  ears — the  flow  of  the  Tweed  over 
its  pebbles. 

Significant,  therefore,  is  Scott's  treatment  of  landscape, 
and  the  difference  in  this  regard  between  himself  and 

*  See  vol.  i.,  p.  200. 


12  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

his  great  contemporaries.  His  friend,  Mr.  Morritt  of 
Rokeby,  testifies :  "He  was  but  half  satisfied  with  the 
most  beautiful  scenery  when  he  could  not  connect  it  with 
some  local  legend."  Scott  had  to  the  full  the  romantic 
love  of  mountain  and  lake,  yet  "  to  me,"  he  confesses, 
"  the  wandering  over  the  field  of  Bannockburn  was  the 
source  of  more  exquisite  pleasure  than  gazing  upon  the 
celebrated  landscape  from  the  battlements  of  Stirling 
Castle.  I  do  not  by  any  means  infer  that  I  was  dead  to 
the  feeling  of  picturesque  scenery.  .  .  .  But  show  me  an 
old  castle  or  a  field  of  battle  and  I  was  at  home  at  once." 
And  again :  "  The  love  of  natural  beauty,  more  especially 
when  combined  with  ancient  ruins  or  remains  of  our 
fathers'  piety*  or  splendour,  became  with  me  an  insati- 
able passion."  It  was  not  in  this  sense  that  high  moun- 
tains were  a  "  passion  "  to  Byron,  nor  yet  to  Wordsworth. 
In  a  letter  to  Miss  Seward,  Scott  wrote  of  popular  poetry: 
"  Much  of  its  peculiar  charm  is  indeed,  I  believe,  to  be 
attributed  solely  to  its  locality.  ...  In  some  verses  of 
that  eccentric  but  admirable  poet  Coleridge  f  he  talks  of 

'  An  old  rude  tale  that  suited  well 
The  ruins  wild  and  hoary. ' 

I  think  there  are  few  who  have  not  been  in  some  de- 
gree touched  with  this  local  sympathy.  Tell  a  peasant 
an  ordinary  tale  of  robbery  and  murder,  and  perhaps  you 

*  The  Abbey  of  Tintern  was  irrelevant  to  Wordsworth. — 
Herford,  "The  Age  of  Wordsworth,"  Int.,  p.  xx. 

f  "  Dear  Sir  Walter  Scott  and  myself  were  exact,  but  harmo- 
nious, opposites  in  this ; — that  every  old  ruin,  hill,  river  or 
tree  called  up  in  his  mind  a  host  of  historical  or  biographical 
associations  ;  .  .  .  whereas,  for  myself  ...  I  believe  I  should 
walk  over  the  plain  of  Marathon  without  taking  more  interest 
in  it  than  in  any  other  plain  of  similar  features." — Coleridge, 
"Table  Talk,"  August  4.  1833. 


Walter  Scott.  13 

may  fail  to  interest  him;  but,  to  excite  his  terrors,  you 
assure  him  it  happened  on  the  very  heath  he  usually 
crosses,  or  to  a  man  whose  family  he  has  known,  and  you 
rarely  meet  such  a  mere  image  of  humanity  as  remains 
entirely  unmoved.  I  suspect  it  is  pretty  much  the  same 
with  myself." 

Scott  liked  to  feel  solid  ground  of  history,  or  at  least 
of  legend,  under  his  feet.  He  connected  his  wildest 
tales,  like  "Glenfinlas"  and  "The  Eve  of  St.  John,"  with 
definite  names  and  places.  This  Antaeus  of  romance  lost 
strength,  as  soon  as  he  was  lifted  above  the  earth.  With 
Coleridge  it  was  just  the  contrary.  The  moment  his 
moonlit,  vapory  enchantments  touched  ground,  the  con- 
tact "  precipitated  the  whole  solution."  In  18 13  Scott 
had  printed  "  The  Bridal  of  Triermain "  anonymously, 
with  a  preface  designed  to  mislead  the  public;  having 
contrived,  by  way  of  a  joke,  to  fasten  the  authorship  of 
the  piece  upon  Erskine.  This  poem  is  as  pure  fantasy 
as  Tennyson's  "  Day  Dream,"  and  tells  the  story  of  a 
knight  who,  in  obedience  to  a  vision  and  the  instructions 
of  an  ancient  sage  "  sprung  from  Druid  sires,"  enters  an 
enchanted  castle  and  frees  the  Princess  Gyneth,  a  natural 
daughter  of  King  Arthur,  from  the  spell  that  has  bound 
her  for  five  hundred  years.  But  true  to  his  instinct,  the 
poet  lays  his  scene  not  in  vacuo,  but  near  his  own  beloved 
borderland.  He  found,  in  Burns'  "Antiquities  of  West- 
moreland and  Cumberland"  mention  of  a  line  of  Rolands 
de  Vaux,  lords  of  Triermain,  a  fief  of  the  barony  of  Gils- 
land;  and  this  furnished  him  a  name  for  his  hero.  He 
found  in  Hutchinson's  "Excursion  to  the  Lakes"  the 
description/^  a  cluster  of  rocks  in  the  Vale  of  St.  John's, 
which  looked,  at  a  distance,  like  a  Gothic  castle;    this 


14  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

supplied  him  with  a  hint  for  the  whole  adventure.  Mean- 
while Coleridge  had  been  living  in  the  Lake  Country. 
The  wheels  of  his  "Christabel"  had  got  hopelessly 
mired,  and  he  now  borrowed  a  horse  from  Sir  Walter  and 
hitched  it  to  his  own  wagon.  He  took  over  Sir  Roland 
de  Vaux  of  Triermain  and  made  him  the  putative  father 
of  his  mysterious  Geraldine,  although,  in  compliance 
with  Scott's  romance,  the  embassy  that  goes  over  the 
mountains  to  Sir  Roland's  castle  can  find  no  trace  of  it. 
In  Part  I.  Sir  Leoline's  own  castle  stood  nowhere  in 
particular.  In  Part  II.  it  is  transferred  to  Cumberland, 
a  mistake  in  art  almost  as  grave  as  if  the  Ancient  Mar- 
iner had  brought  his  ship  to  port  at  Liverpool. 

Wordsworth  visited  the  "  great  Minstrel  of  the  Border  " 
at  Abbotsford  in  1 831,  shortly  before  Scott  set  out  for 
Naples,  and  the  two  poets  went  in  company  to  the  ruins 
of  Newark  Castle.  It  is  characteristic  that  in  "  Yarrow 
Revisited,"  which  commemorates  the  incident,  the  Bard 
of  Rydal  should  think  it  necessary  to  offer  an  apology 
for  his  distinguished  host's  habit  of  romanticising 
nature — that  nature  which  Wordsworth,  romantic  neither 
in  temper  nor  choice  of  subject,  treated  after  so  dif- 
ferent a  fashion. 

"  Nor  deem  that  localised  Romance 

Plays  false  with  our  affections  ; 
Unsanctifies  our  tears — made  sport 

For  fanciful  dejections : 
Ah  no !  the  visions  of  the  past 

Sustain  the  heart  in  feeling 
Life  as  she  is — our  changeful  Life, 

With  friends  and  kindred  dealing." 

The  apology,  after  all,  is  only  half-heartec^  For  while 
Wordsworth  esteemed  Scott  highly  and  was  careful  to 


Walter  Scott.  15 

speak  publicly  of  his  work  with  a  qualified  respect,  it  is 
well  known  that,  in  private,  he  set  little  value  upon  it, 
and  once  somewhat  petulantly  declared  that  all  Scott's 
poetry  was  not  worth  sixpence.  He  wrote  to  Scott,  of 
"  Marmion  " :  "I  think  your  end  has  been  attained.  That 
it  is  not  the  end  which  I  should  wish  you  to  propose  to 
yourself,  you  will  be  aware."  He  had  visited  Scott  at 
Lasswade  as  early  as  1803,  and  in  recording  his  impres- 
sions notes  that  "  his  conversation  was  full  of  anecdote 
and  averse  from  disquisition."  The  minstrel  was  a 
raconteur  and  lived  in  the  past;  the  bard  was  a  moralist 
and  lived  in  the  present. 

There  are  several  poems  of  Wordsworth's  and  Scott's 
touching  upon  common  ground  which  serve  to  contrast 
their  methods  sharply  and  to  illustrate  in  a  striking  way 
the  precise  character  of  Scott's  romanticism.  "  Helvel- 
lyn"  and  "Fidelity"  were  written  independently  and 
celebrate  the  same  incident.  In  1805  a  young  man  lost 
his  way  on  the  Cumberland  mountains  and  perished  of 
exposure.  Three  months  afterwards  his  body  was  found, 
his  faithful  dog  still  watching  beside  it.  Scott  was  a 
lover  of  dogs — loved  them  warmly,  individually;  so  to 
speak,  personally ;  and  all  dogs  instinctively  loved  Scott* 

Wordsworth  had  a  sort  of  tepid,  theoretical  benevo- 
lence towards  the  animal  creation  in  general.  Yet  as 
between  the  two  poets,  the  advantage  in  depth  of  feeling 


*  See  the  delightful  anecdote  preserved  by  Carlyle  about  the 
little  Blenheim  cocker  who  hated  the  "genus  acrid-quack" 
and  formed  an  immediate  attachment  to  Sir  Walter.  Words- 
worth was  far  from  being  an  acrid  quack,  or  even  a  solemn 
prig — another  genus  hated  of  dogs — but  there  was  something 
a  little  unsympathetic  in  his  personality.  The  dalesmen 
liked  poor  Hartley  Coleridge  better. 


1 6  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

is,  as  usual,  with  Wordsworth.  Both  render,  with  per- 
haps equal  power,  though  in  characteristically  different 
ways,  the  impression  of  the  austere  and  desolate  grandeur 
of  the  mountain  scenery.  But  the  thought  to  which 
Wordsworth  leads  up  is  the  mysterious  divineness  of  in- 
stinct 

"...  that  strength  of  feeling,  great 
Above  all  human  estimate :" — 

while  Scott  conducts  his  story  to  the  reflection  that  Na- 
ture has  given  the  dead  man  a  more  stately  funeral  than 
the  Church  could  have  given,  a  comparison  seemingly 
dragged  in  for  the  sake  of  a  stanzaful  of  his  favourite 
Gothic  imagery. 

"  When  a  Prince  to  the  fate  of  the  Peasant  has  yielded, 
The  tapestry  waves  dark  round  the  dim-lighted  hall ; 
With  'scutcheons  of  silver  the  coffin  is  shielded, 

And  pages  stand  mute  by  the  canopied  pall : 
Through  the  courts  at  deep  midnight  the  torches  are  gleam- 
ing, 
In  the  proudly  arched  chapel  the  banners  are  beaming, 
Far  adown  the  long  aisle  sacred  music  is  streaming, 
Lamenting  a  chief  of  the  people  should  fall. " 

Wordsworth  and  Landor,  who  seldom  agreed,  agreed 
that  Scott's  most  imaginative  line  was  the  verse  in 
"  Helvellyn  " : 

"When  the  wind  waved  his  garment  how  oft  didst  thou 
start ! " 

In  several  of  his  poems  Wordsworth  handled  legendary 
subjects,  and  it  is  most  instructive  here  to  notice  his 
avoidance  of  the  romantic  note,  and  to  imagine  how  Scott 
would  have  managed  the  same  material.  In  the  prefa- 
tory note  to  "  The  White  Doe  of  Rylstone,"  Wordsworth 
himself  pointed  out  the  difference.     "  The  subject  being 


Walter  Scott.  17 

taken  from  feudal  times  has  led  to  its  being  compared  to 
some  of  Sir  Walter  Scott's  poems  that  belong  to  the  same 
age  and  state  of  society.  The  comparison  is  inconsid- 
erate. Sir  Walter  pursued  the  customary  and  very  natu- 
ral course  of  conducting  an  action,  presenting  various 
turns  of  fortune,  to  some  outstanding  point  on  which  the 
mind  might  rest  as  a  termination  or  catastrophe.  The 
course  I  attempted  to  pursue  is  entirely  different.  Every- 
thing that  is  attempted  by  the  principal  personages  in 
*  The  White  Doe '  fails,  so  far  as  its  object  is  external 
and  substantial.  So  far  as  it  is  moral  and  spiritual  it 
succeeds." 

This  poem  is  founded  upon  "The  Rising  in  the 
North,"  a  ballad  given  in  the  "Reliques,"  which  re- 
counts the  insurrection  of  the  Earls  of  Northumberland 
and  Westmoreland  against  Elizabeth  in  1569.  Richard 
Norton  of  Rylstone,  with  seven  stalwart  sons,  joined  in 
the  rising,  carrying  a  banner  embroidered  with  a  red 
cross  and  the  five  wounds  of  Christ.  The  story  bristled 
with  opportunities  for  the  display  of  feudal  pomp,  and  it 
is  obvious  upon  what  points  in  the  action  Scott  would 
have  laid  the  emphasis;  the  muster  of  the  tenantry  of  the 
great  northern  Catholic  houses  of  Percy  and  Neville;  the 
high  mass  celebrated  by  the  insurgents  in  Durham  Cathe- 
dral ;  the  march  of  the  Nortons  to  Brancepeth ;  the  eleven 
days'  siege  of  Barden  Tower;  the  capture  and  execution 
of  Marmaduke  and  Ambrose;  and— by  way  of  episode — 
the  Battle  of  Neville's  Cross  in  1346.*  But  in  conform- 
ity to  the  principle  announced    in    the   preface  to  the 

*  Scott  could  scarcely  have  forborne  to  introduce  the  figure 
of  the  Queen  of  Scots,  to  insure  whose  marriage  with  Norfolk 
was  one  of  the  objects  of  the  rising. 
2 


1 8  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

"Lyrical  Ballads" — that  the  feeling  should  give  impor- 
tance to  the  incidents  and  situation,  not  the  incidents  and 
situation  to  the  feeling — Wordsworth  treats  all  this  out- 
ward action  as  merely  preparatory  to  the  true  purpose  of 
his  poem,  a  study  of  the  discipline  of  sorrow,  of  ruin  and 
bereavement  patiently  endured  by  the  Lady  Emily,  the 
only  daughter  and  survivor  of  the  Norton  house. 

"  Action  is  transitory — a  step,  a  blow.  .  .  . 
Suffering  is  permanent,  obscure  and  dark, 
And  has  the  nature  of  infinity. 
Yet  through  that  darkness  (infinite  though  it  seem 
And  irremoveable)  gracious  openings  lie.  .  .  . 
Even  to  the  fountain-head  of  peace  divine." 

With  the  story  of  the  Nortons  the  poet  connects  a  local 
tradition  which  he  found  in  Whitaker's  "  History  of  the 
Deanery  of  Craven  w;  of  a  white  doe  which  haunted  the 
churchyard  of  Bolton  Priory.  Between  this  gentle  crea- 
ture and  the  forlorn  Lady  of  Rylstone  he  establishes  the 
mysterious  and  soothing  sympathy  which  he  was  always 
fond  of  imagining  between  the  soul  of  man  and  the  things 
of  nature.* 

Or  take  again  the  "  Song  at  the  Feast  of  Brougham 
Castle,"  an  incident  in  the  Wars  of  the  Roses.  Lord 
Clifford,  who  had  been  hidden  away  in  infancy  from  the 
vengeance  of  the  Yorkists  and  reared  as  a  shepherd,  is 
restored  to  the  estates  and  honours  of  his  ancestors. 
High  in  the  festal  hall  the  impassioned  minstrel  strikes 
his  harp  and  sings  the  triumph  of  Lancaster,  urging  the 
shepherd  lord  to  emulate  the  warlike  prowess  of  his  fore- 
fathers. 

*  For  a  full  review  of  "The  White  Doe  "  the  reader  should 
consult  Principal  Shairp's  "Aspects  of  Poetry,"  1881. 


Walter  Scott  19 

"  Armour  rusting  in  his  halls 
On  the  blood  of  Clifford  calls  ; 
1  Quell  the  Scot, '  exclaims  the  Lance — 
Bear  me  to  the  heart  of  France 
Is  the  longing  of  the  Shield. " 

Thus  far  the  minstrel,  and  he  has  Sir  Walter  with 
him ;  for  this  is  evidently  the  part  of  the  poem  that  he 
liked  and  remembered,  when  he  noted  in  his  journal  that 
"  Wordsworth  could  be  popular  *  if  he  would — witness 
the  '  Feast  at  Brougham  Castle '— '  Song  of  the  Cliffords/ 
I  think,  is  the  name."  But  the  exultant  strain  ceases 
and  the  poet  himself  speaks,  and  with  the  transition  in 
feeling  comes  a  change  in  the  verse;  the  minstrel's  song 
was  in  the  octosyllabic  couplet  associated  with  metrical 
romance.  But  this  Clifford  was  no  fighter — none  of 
Scott's  heroes.     Nature  had  educated  him. 

"  In  him  the  savage  virtue  of  the  Race  "  was  dead. 

"  Love  had  he  found  in  huts  where  poor  men  lie  ; 
His  daily  teachers  had  been  woods  and  rills, 
The  silence  that  is  in  the  starry  sky, 
The  sleep  that  is  among  the  lonely  hills." 

Once  more,  consider  the  pronounced  difference  in  sen- 
timent between  the  description  of  the  chase  in  "  Hart- 
leap  Well "  and  the  opening  passage  of  "  The  Lady  of 
the  Lake  " : 

"The  stag  at  eve  had  drunk  his  fill. 
Where  danced  the  moon  on  Monan's  rill,"  etc.f 

*  Scott  averred  that  Wordsworth  offended  public  taste  on 
system. 

fThis  is  incomparable,  not  only  as  a  masterpiece  of  ro- 
mantic narrative,  but  for  the  spirited  and  natural  device  by 
which  the  hero  is  conducted  to  his  adventure.  R.  L.  Steven- 
son and  other  critics  have  been  rather  hard  upon  Scott's  de- 
fects as  an  artist.  He  was  indeed  no  stylist :  least  of  all  a 
precieux.     There  are  no  close-set  mosaics  in  his  somewhat 


20  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Scott  was  a  keen  sportsman,  and  his  sympathy  was  with 
the  hunter.*  Wordsworth's,  of  course,  was  with  the 
quarry.  The  knight  in  his  poem — who  bears  not  unsug- 
gestively  the  name  of  "  Sir  Walter  " — has  outstripped  all 
his  companions,  like  Fitz  James,  and  is  the  only  one  in 
at  the  death.  To  commemorate  his  triumph  he  frames  a 
basin  for  the  spring  whose  waters  were  stirred  by  his 
victim's  dying  breath;  he  plants  three  stone  pillars  to 
mark  the  creature's  hoof-prints  in  its  marvellous  leap 
from  the  mountain  to  the  springside;  and  he  builds  a 
pleasure  house  and  an  arbour  where  he  comes  with  his 
paramour  to  make  merry  in  the  summer  days.  But  Na- 
ture sets  her  seal  of  condemnation  upon  the  cruelty  and 
vainglory  of  man.  "  The  spot  is  curst " ;  no  flowers  or 
grass  will  grow  there;  no  beast  will  drink  of  the  fountain. 
Part  I.  tells  the  story  without  enthusiasm  but  without 
comment.     Part  II.  draws  the  lesson 

"  Never  to  blend  our  pleasure  or  our  pride 
With  sorrow  of  the  meanest  thing  that  feels." 

The  song  of  Wordsworth's  "Solitary  Reaper"  derives 
a  pensive  sorrow  from  "old,  unhappy,  far-off  things  and 
battles  long  ago."  But  to  Scott  the  battle  is  not  far  off, 
but  a  vivid  and  present  reality.     When  he  visited  the 

slip-shod  prose,  and  he  did  not  seek  for  the  right  word  "with 
moroseness,"  like  Landor.  But,  in  his  large  fashion,  he  was 
skilful  in  inventing  impressive  effects.  Another  instance  is 
the  solitary  trumpet  that  breathed  its  "note  of  defiance  "in 
the  lists  of  Ashby-de-la-Zouch,  which  has  the  genuine  melo- 
dramatic thrill — like  the  horn  of  Hernani  or  the  bell  that  tolls 
in  "Venice  Preserved." 

*  See  the  "  Hunting  Song"  in  his  continuation  of  "Queen- 
hoo  Hall  "— 

"Waken,  lords  and  ladies  gay, 
On  the  mountain  dawns  the  day." 


or 


Walter  Scott.  2 1 


Trosachs  glen,  his  thought  painly  was,  "  What  a  place  for 
a  fight!  "  And  when  James  looks  down  on  Loch  Katrine 
his  first  reflection  is,  "What  a  scene  were  here  .  .  . 

"For  princely  pomp  or  churchman's  pride ! 
On  this  bold  brow  a  lordly  tower ; 
In  that  soft  vale  a  lady' s  bower ; 
.  On  yonder  meadow,  far  away, 
The  turrets  of  a  cloister  grey,"  etc. 

The  most  romantic  scene  was  not  romantic  enough  for 
Scott  till  his  imagination  had  peopled  it  with  the  life  of 
a  vanished  age. 

The  literary  forms  which  Scott  made  peculiarly  his 
own,  and  in  which  the  greater  part  of  his  creative  work 
was  done,  are  three:  the  popular_ballad,  the  metrical 
romance,  and  the  historicaljio_vel  in  prose.  His  point 
of  departure  was  the  ballad.*  The  material  amassed  in 
his  Liddesdale  "raids" — begun  in  1792  and  continued 
for  seven  successive  years — was  given  to  the  world  in  the 
"Minstrelsy  of  the  Scottish  Border  "(Vols.  I.  and  II.  in 
1802;  Vol.  III.  in  1803),  a  collection  of  ballads  histori- 
cal, legendary,  and  romantic,  with  an  abundant  apparatus 
in  the  way  of  notes  and  introductions,  illustrating  the 
history,  antiquities,  manners,  traditions,  and  superstitions 
of  the  Borderers.  Forty-three  of  the  ballads  in  the 
"  Minstrelsy  "  had  never  been  printed  before ;  and  of  the 
remainder  the  editor  gave  superior  versions,  choosing 
with  sureness  of  taste  the  best  among  variant  readings, 
and  with  a  more  intimate  knowledge  of  local  ways  and 
language  than  any  previous  ballad-fancier  had  com- 
manded. He  handled  his  texts  more  faithfully  than 
Percy,   rarely   substituting   lines  of   his   own.     "From 

*  See  vol.  i.,  pp.  277  and  390. 


22  cA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

among  a  hundred  corruptions,"  says  Lockhart,  "  he  seized, 
with  instinctive  tact,  the  primitive  diction  and  imagery, 
and  produced  strains  in  which  the  unbroken  energy  of 
half-civilised  ages,  their  stern  and  deep  passions,  their 
daring  adventures  and  cruel  tragedies,  and  even  their 
rude  wild  humour  are  reflected  with  almost  the  brightness 
of  a  Homeric  mirror." 

In  the  second  volume  of  the  "Minstrelsy "  were  in- 
cluded what  Scott  calls  his  "first  serious  attempts  in 
verse,"  viz.,  "Glenfinlas"  and  "The  Eve  of  St.  John," 
which  had  been  already  printed  in  Lewis'  "Tales  of 
Wonder."  Both  pieces  are  purely  romantic,  with  a  strong 
tincture  of  the  supernatural ;  but  the  first — Scott  himself 
draws  the  distinction — is  a  "  legendary  poem,"  and  the 
second  alone  a  proper  "  ballad."  "  Glenfinlas,"  *  founded 
on  a  Gaelic  legend,  tells  how  a  Highland  chieftain  while 
hunting  in  Perthshire,  near  the  scene  of  "  The  Lady  of  the 
Lake,"  is  lured  from  his  bothie  at  night  and  torn  to 
pieces  by  evil  spirits.  There  is  no  attempt  here  to  pre- 
serve the  language  of  popular  poetry;  stanzas  abound  in 
a  diction  of  which  the  following  is  a  fair  example: 

"Long  have  I  sought  sweet  Mary's  heart, 
And  dropp'd  the  tear  and  heaved  the  sigh : 
But  vain  the  lover's  wily  art 
Beneath  a  sister's  watchful  eye." 

"  The  Eve  of  St.  John  "  employs  common  ballad  stuff,  the 
visit  of  a  murdered  lover's  ghost  to  his  lady's  bedside — 

"  At  the  lone  midnight  hour,  when  bad  spirits  have  power  " — 

but  the  poet,  as  usual,  anchors  his  weird  nightmares 
firmly  to  real  names  and  times  and  places,  Dryburgh 

*  The  Glen  of  the  Green  Women. 


Walter  Scott.  23 

Abbey,  the  black  rood  of  Melrose,  the  Eildon-tree,  the 
bold  Buccleuch,  and  the  Battle  of  Ancram  Moor  (1545). 
The  exact  scene  of  the  tragedy  is  Smailholme  Tower,  the 
ruined  keep  on  the  crags  above  his  grandfather's  farm 
at  Sandynowe,  which  left  such  an  indelible  impression 
on  Scott's  childish  imagination.*  "  The  Eve  "  is  in  bal- 
lad style  and  verse : 

"Thou  liest,  thou  liest,  thou  little  foot  page, 
Loud  dost  thou  lie  to  me  ! 

For  that  knight  is  cold,  and  low  laid  in  the  mould, 
All  under  the  Eildon  tree." 

In  his  "  Essay  on  the  Imitation  of  Popular  Poetry," 
Scott  showed  that  he  understood  the  theory  of  ballad 
composition.  When  he  took  pains,  he  could  catch  the 
very  manner  as  well  as  the  spirit  of  ancient  minstrelsy; 
but  if  his  work  is  examined  under  the  microscope  it  is 
easy  to  detect  flaws.  The  technique  of  the  Pre-Raphael- 
ites  and  other  modern  balladists,  like  Rossetti  and  Mor- 
ris, is  frequently  finer;  they  reproduce  more  scrupulously 
the  formal  characteristics  of  popular  poetry :  the  burden, 

*  "And  still  I  thought  that  shattered  tower 

The  mightiest  work  of  human  power  ; 

And  marvelled  as  the  aged  hind 

With  some  strange  tale  bewitched  my  mind, 

Of  foragers  who,  with  headlong  force, 

Down  from  that  strength  had  spurred  their  horse, 

Their  Southern  rapine  to  renew, 

Far  in  the  distant  Cheviots  blue  ; 

And,  home  returning,  filled  the  hall 

With  revel,  wassail-rout  and  brawl." — "Marmion."  In- 
troduction to  Canto  Third.  See  Lockhart  for  a  de- 
scription of  the  view  from  Smailholme,  a  propos 
of  the  stanza  in  "The  Eve  of  St.  John"  : 

"That  lady  sat  in  mournful  mood  ; 
Looked  over  hill  and  vale  : 
O'ver  Tweed's  fair  flood,  and  Mertoun's  wood, 
And  all  down  Teviot  dale. " 


24  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

the  sing-song  repetitions,  the  quaint  turns  of  phrase,  the 
imperfect  rimes,  the  innocent,  childlike  air  of  the  me- 
diaeval tale-tellers.  Scott's  vocabulary  is  not  consist- 
ently archaic,  and  he  was  not  always  careful  to  avoid 
locutions  out  of  keeping  with  the  style  of  Volkspoesie* 
He  was  by  no  means  a  rebel  against  eighteenth-century 
usages. f  In  his  prose  he  is  capable  of  speaking  of  a  lady 
as  an  "  elegant  female."  In  his  poetry  he  will  begin  a 
ballad  thus : 

"The  Pope  he  was  saying  the  high,  high  mass 
All  on  St.  Peter's  day  "  ; 

and  then  a  little  later  fall  into  this  kind  of  thing: 

"There  the  rapt  poet's  step  may  rove, 
And  yield  the  muse  the  day : 
There  Beauty,  led  by  timid  Love, 
May  shun  the  tell-tale  ray,"  etc.  % 

It  is  possible  to  name  single  pieces  like  "  The  Ancient 
Mariner,"  and  "  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci,"  and  "  Rose- 
Mary,"  of  a  rarer  imaginative  quality  and  a  more  perfect 
workmanship  than  Scott  often  attains;  yet  upon  the  whole 
and  in  the  mass,  no  modern  balladry  matches  the  success 
of  his.  The  Pre-Raphaelites  were  deliberate  artists,  con- 
sciously reproducing  an  extinct  literary  form ;  but  Scott 
had  lived  himself  back  into  the  social  conditions  out  of 
which  ballad  poetry  was  born.  His  best  pieces  of  this 
class  do  not  strike  us  as  imitations  but  as  original,  spon- 

*  See  vol.  i.,  pp.  394-395- 

f  Scott's  verse  "is  touched  both  with  the  facile  redundance 
of  the  mediaeval  romances  in  which  he  was  steeped,  and  with 
the  meretricious  phraseology  of  the  later  eighteenth  century, 
which  he  was  too  genuine  a  literary  Tory  wholly  to  put  aside." 
— "The  Age  of  Wordsworth,"  C.  H.  Herford,  London,  1897. 

%  "The  Gray  Brother"  in  vol.  iii.  of  the  "Minstrelsy." 


Walter  Scott.  25 

taneous,  and  thoroughly  alive.  Such  are,  to  particularise 
but  a  few,  "Jock  o'  Hazeldean,"  "Cadyow  Castle,"  on 
the  assassination  of  the  Regent  Murray ;  "  The  Reiver's 
Wedding,"  a  fragment  preserved  in  Lockhart's  "  Life  " ; 
"Elspeth's  Ballad"  ("The  Red  Harlow")  in  "The  An- 
tiquary"; Madge  Wildfire's  songs  in  "The  Heart  of 
Mid-Lothian,"  and  David  Gellatley's  in  "Waverley"; 
besides  the  other  scraps  and  snatches  of  minstrelsy  too 
numerous  for  mention,  sown  through  the  novels  and 
longer  poems.  For  in  spite  of  detraction,  Walter  Scott 
remains  one  of  the  foremost  British  lyrists.  In  Mr.  Pal- 
grave's  "  Treasury  "  he  is  represented  by  a  larger  number 
of  selections  than  either  Milton,  Byron,  Burns,  Campbell, 
Keats,  or  Herrick;  making  an  easy  fourth  to  Wordsworth, 
Shakspere,  and  Shelley.  And  in  marked  contrast  with 
Shelley  especially,  it  is  observable  of  Scott's  contribu- 
tions to  this  anthology  that  they  are  not  the  utterance  of 
the  poet's  personal  emotion ;  they  are  coronachs,  pibrochs, 
gathering  songs,  narrative  ballads,  and  the  like — objec- 
tive, dramatic  lyrics  touched  always  with  the  light  of  his- 
tory or  legend. 

The  step  from  ballad  to  ballad-epic  is  an  easy  one,  and 
it  was  by  a  natural  evolution  that  the  one  passed  into  the 
other  in  Scott's  hands.  "  The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel  " 
(1805)  was  begun  as  a  ballad  on  the  local  tradition  of 
Gilpin  Horner  and  at  the  request  of  the  Countess  of  Dal- 
keith, who  told  Scott  the  story.  But  his  imagination  was 
so  full  that  the  poem  soon  overflowed  its  limits  and  ex- 
panded into  a  romance  illustrative  of  the  ancient  manners 
of  the  Border.  The  pranks  of  the  goblin  page  run  in 
and  out  through  the  web  of  the  tale,  a  slender  and  some- 
what inconsequential  thread  of  diablerie.     Byron  had  his 


26  •  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

laugh  at  it  in  "  English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers  " ;  * 
and  in  a  footnote  on  the  passage,  he  adds :  "  Never  was 
any  plan  so  incongruous  and  absurd  as  the  groundwork 
of  this  production."  The  criticism  was  not  altogether 
undeserved;  for  the  "Lay"  is  a  typical  example  of  ro- 
mantic, as  distinguished  from  classic,  art  both  in  its 
strength  and  in  its  weakness ;  brilliant  in  passages,  faulty 
in  architechtonic,  and  uneven  in  execution.  Its  super- 
natural machinery — Byron  said  that  it  had  more  "gram- 
arye"  than  grammar — is  not  impressive,  if  due  exception 
be  made  of  the  opening  of  Michael  Scott's  tomb  in  Canto 
Second. 

When  the  "  Minstrelsy  "  was  published,  it  was  remarked 
that  it  "  contained  the  elements  of  a  hundred  historical 
romances."  It  was  from  such  elements  that  Scott  built 
up  the  structure  of  his  poem  about  the  nucleus  which  the 
Countess  of  Dalkeith  had  given  him.  He  was  less  con- 
cerned, as  he  acknowledged,  to  tell  a  coherent  story  than 
to  paint  a  picture  of  the  scenery  and  the  old  warlike  life 
of  the  Border;  that  tableau  large  de  la  vie  which  the 
French  romanticists  afterwards  professed  to  be  the  aim 
of  their  novels  and  dramas.  The  feud  of  the  Scotts  and 
Carrs  furnished  him  with  a  historic  background;  with 
this  he  enwove  a  love  story  of  the  Romeo  and  Juliet  pat- 
tern. He  rebuilt  Melrose  Abbey,  and  showed  it  by  moon- 
light; set  Lords  Dacre  and  Howard  marching  on  a 
Warden-raid,  and  roused  the  border  clans  to  meet  them; 
threw  out  dramatic  character  sketches  of  "  stark  moss- 


*  "And  goblin  brats,  of  Gilpin  Horner's  brood, 
Decoy  young  border-nobles  through  the  wood, 
And  skip  at  every  step,  Lord  knows  how  high. 
And  frighten  foolish  babes,  the  Lord  knows  why. 


Walter  Scott.  27 

riding  Scots  "  like  Wat  Tinlinn  and  William  of  Deloraine ; 
and  finally  enclosed  the  whole  in  a  cadre  most  happily 
invented,  the  venerable,  pathetic  figure  of  the  old  min- 
strel who  tells  the  tale  to  the  Duchess  of  Monmouth  at 
Newark  Castle. 

The  love  story  is  perhaps  the  weakest  part  of  the  poem. 
Henry  Cranstoun  and  Margaret  of  Branksome  are  noth- 
ing but  lay  figures.  Scott  is  always  a  little  nervous  when 
the  lover  and  the  lady  are  left  alone  together.  The  fair 
dames  in  the  audience  expect  a  tender  scene,  but  the 
harper  pleads  his  age,  by  way  of  apology,  gets  the  busi- 
ness over  as  decently  as  may  be,  and  hastens  on  with  comic 
precipitation  to  the  fighting,  which  he  thoroughly  enjoys.* 
The  "  light-horseman  stanza  "  which  Scott  employed 
in  his  longer  poems  was  caught  from  the  recitation  by 
Sir  John  Stoddart  of  a  portion  of  Coleridge's  "  Christabel," 
then  still  in  manuscript.  The  norm  of  the  verse  was  the 
eight-syllabled  riming  couplet  used  in  most  of  the  Eng- 
lish metrical  romances  of  the  thirteenth  and  fourteenth 
centuries.  It  is  a  form  of  verse  which  moves  more  swiftly 
than  blank  verse  or  the  heroic  couplet,  and  is  perhaps 
better  suited  for  romantic  poetry. f  But  it  is  liable  to 
grow  monotonous  in  a  long  poem,  and  Coleridge's  un- 
surpassed skill  as  a  metrist  was  exerted  to  give  it  free- 
dom, richness,  and  variety  by  the  introduction  of  ana- 
paestic lines  and  alternate  rimes  and  triplets,  breaking 
up  the  couplets  into  a  series  of  irregular  stanzas. 

*  "Now  leave  we  Margaret  and  her  knight 
To  tell  you  of  the  approaching  fight. " 

— Canto  Fifth,  xiii. 
f  Landor  says  oddly  of  Warton  that  he  "had  lost  his  ear  by 
laying  it  down  on  low  swampy  places,  on  ballads  and  son- 
nets. 


28  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

With  "The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel"  romanticism 
came  of  age  and  entered  on  its  career  of  triumph.  One 
wishes  that  Collins  and  Tom  Warton  might  have  lived 
to  hail  it  as  the  light,  at  last,  towards  which  they  had 
struggled  through  the  cold  obstruction  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  One  fancies  Dr.  Johnson's  disgust  over  this 
new  Scotch  monstrosity,  which  had  every  quality  that  he 
disliked  except  blank  verse;  or  Gray's  delight  in  it,  tem- 
pered by  a  critical  disapproval  of  its  loose  construction 
and  irregularity.  Scott's  romances  in  prose  and  verse 
are  still  so  universally  known  as  to  make  any  review  of 
them  here  individually  an  impertinence.  Their  impact 
on  contemporary  Europe  was  instantaneous  and  wide- 
spread. There  is  no  record  elsewhere  in  literary  history 
of  such  success.  Their  immense  sales,  the  innumerable 
editions  and  translations  and  imitations  of  them,  are  mat- 
ters of  familiar  knowledge.  Poem  followed  poem,  and 
novel,  novel  in  swift  and  seemingly  exhaustless  succes- 
sion, and  each  was  awaited  by  the  public  with  unabated 
expectancy.  Here  once  more  was  a  poet  who  could  tell 
the  world  a  story  that  it  wanted  to  hear ;  a  poet 

"Such  as  it  had 
In  the  ages  glad. 
Long  ago. " 

The  Homeric  *  quality  which  criticism  has  attributed 
or  denied  to  these  poems  is  really  there.  The  difference, 
the  inferiority  is  obvious  of  course.  They  are  not  in  the 
grand  style ;  they  are  epic  on  a  lower  plane,  ballad-epic, 
bastard-epic  perhaps,  but  they  are  epic.    No  English  verse 

*  Does  not  the  quarrel  of  Richard  and  Philip  in  "The  Tal- 
isman "  remind  one  irresistibly  of  Achilles  and  Agamemnon  in 
the  "Iliad"? 


Walter  Scott.  29 

narrative  except  Chaucer's  ranks,  as  a  whole,  above 
Scott's.  Chaucer's  disciple,  William  Morris,  has  an 
equal  flow  and  continuity,  and  keeps  a  more  even  level 
of  style;  but  his  story-telling  is  languid  compared  with 
Scott's.  The  latter  is  greater  in  the  dynamic  than  in  the 
static  department — in  scenes  of  rapid  action  and  keen 
excitement.  His  show  passages  are  such  as  the  fight  in 
the  Trosachs,  Flodden  Field,  William  of  Deloraine's 
ride  to  Melrose,  the  trial  of  Constance,  the  muster  on  the 
Borough  Moor,  Marmion's  defiance  to  Douglas,  the  com- 
bat of  James  and  Roderick  Dhu,  the  summons  of  the  fiery 
cross,  and  the  kindling  of  the  need-fires — those  romantic 
equivalents  of  the  AapLxadr^opot  in  the  "Agamemnon." 

In  the  series  of  long  poems  which  followed  the  "Lay," 
Scott  deserted  the  Border  and  brought  in  new  subjects  of 
romantic  interest,  the  traditions  of  Flodden  and  Bannock- 
burn,  the  manners  of  the  Gaelic  clansmen,  and  the  wild 
scenery  of  the  Perthshire  Highlands,  the  life  of  the 
Western  Islands,  and  the  rugged  coasts  of  Argyle.  Only 
two  of  these  tales  are  concerned  with  the  Middle  Ages, 
strictly  speaking:  "The  Lord  of  the  Isles"  (181$),  in 
which  the  action  begins  in  1307;  and  "Harold  the 
Dauntless  "  (181 7),  in  which  the  period  is  the  time  of  the 
Danish  settlements  in  Northumbria.  "Rokeby"  (i8r$) 
is  concerned  with  the  Civil  War.  The  scene  is  laid  in 
Yorkshire.  "  Marmion  "  (1808),  and  "The  Lady  of  the 
Lake"  (18 10),  like  "The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,"  had 
to  do  with  the  sixteenth  century,  but  the  poet  imported 
mediaeval  elements  into  all  of  these  by  the  frankest  an- 
achronisms. He  restored  St.  Hilda's  Abbey  and  the 
monastery  at  Lindisfarne,  which  had  been  in  ruins  for 
centuries,  and  peopled  them  again  with  monks  and  nuns. 


30  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

He  revived  in  De  Wilton  the  figure  of  the  palmer  and 
the  ancient  custom  of  pilgrimage  to  Palestine.  And  he 
transferred  "the  wondrous  wizard,  Michael  Scott"  from 
the  thirteenth  century  to  the  end  of  the  fifteenth.  But, 
indeed,  the  state  of  society  in  Scotland  might  be  de- 
scribed as  mediaeval  as  late  as  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth 
century.  It  was  still  feudal,  and  in  great  part  Catholic. 
Particularly  in  the  turbulent  Borderland,  a  rude  spirit  of 
chivalry  and  a  passion  for  wild  adventure  lingered  among 
the  Eliots,  Armstrongs,  Kerrs,  Rutherfords,  Homes,  John- 
stons, and  other  marauding  clans,  who  acknowledged  no 
law  but  march  law,  and  held  slack  allegiance  to  "the 
King  of  Lothian  and  Fife."  Every  owner  of  a  half-ruin- 
ous "  peel  "  or  border  keep  had  a  band  of  retainers  within 
call,  like  the  nine-and-twenty  knights  of  fame  who  hung 
their  shields  in  Branksome  Hall ;  and  he  could  summon 
them  at  short  notice,  for  a  raid  upon  the  English  or  a 
foray  against  some  neighbouring  proprietor  with  whom 
he  was  at  feud. 

But  the  literary  form  under  which  Scott  made  the  deep- 
est impression  upon  the  consciousness  of  his  own  genera- 
tion and  influenced  most  permanently  the  future  literature 
of  Europe,  was  prose  fiction.  As  the  creator  of  the  his- 
torical novel  and  the  ancestor  of  Kingsley,  Ainsworth, 
Bulwer,  and  G.  P.  R.  James;  of  Manzoni,  Freytag,  Hugo, 
Merimee,  Dumas,  Alexis  Tolstoi,  and  a  host  of  others, 
at  home  and  abroad,  his  example  is  potent  yet.  English 
fiction  is  directly  or  indirectly  in  his  debt  for  "Romola," 
"  Hypatia,"  "  Henry  Esmond,"  and  "  The  Cloister  and 
the  Hearth."  In  several  countries  the  historical  novel 
had  been  trying  for  centuries  to  get  itself  born,  but  all  its 
attempts   had   been  abortive.     "Waverley"  is  not  only 


Walter  Scott.  31 

vastly  superior  to  "Thaddeus  of  Warsaw"  (1803)  and 
"The  Scottish  Chiefs  "  (1809);  it  is  something  quite  dif- 
ferent in  kind.*  The  Waverley  Novels,  twenty-nine  in 
number,  appeared  in  the  years  18 14-31.  The  earlier 
numbers  of  the  series,  "Waverley,"  " Guy  Mannering," 
"  The  Antiquary,"  "Old  Mortality,"  "  The  Black  Dwarf," 
"Rob  Roy,"  "The  Heart  of  Mid-Lothian,"  "The  Bride 
of  Lammermoor,"  and  "A  Legend  of  Montrose,"  were 
Scotch  romances  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  cen- 
turies. In  "Ivanhoe"  (1819)  the  author  went  to  England 
for  his  scene,  and  back  to  the  twelfth  century  for  his 
period.  Thenceforth  he  ranged  over  a  wide  region  in 
time  and  space;  Elizabethan  England  ("  Kenilworth"), 
the  France  and  Switzerland  of  Louis  XL  and  Charles 
the  Bold  ("Quentin  Durward"  and  "Anne  of  Geier- 
stein"),  Constantinople  and  Syria  ("Count  Robert  of 
Paris,"  "The  Betrothed,"  and  "The  Talisman")  in  the 
age  of  the  Crusades.  The  fortunes  of  the  Stuarts,  in- 
terested him  specially  and  engaged  him  in  "Wood- 
stock," "The  Fortunes  of  Nigel,"  "The  Monastery,"  and 
its  sequel,  "  The  Abbot."  He  seems  to  have  had,  in  the 
words  of  Mr.  R.  H.  Hutton,  "something  very  like  per- 
sonal experience  of  a  few  centuries." 

Scott's  formula  for  the  construction  of  a  historical 
romance  was  original  with  himself,  and  it  has  been  fol- 
lowed by  alfjiis  successors.  His  story  is  fictitious,  his 
hero^rna^inary.  Richard  I.  is  not  the  hero  of  "  Ivan- 
hoe," nor  Louis  XL  of  "Quentin  Durward."  Shalt*... 
spere  dramatised  history;   Scott  romanticised   it.     Still 

*For  a  review  of  English  historical  fiction  before  Scott,  con- 
sult Professor  Cross'  "Development  of  the  English  Novel," 
pp.  110-114. 


^ 


32  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

it  isjiistory;  the  private^sjojry  is  swept  into  the  stream 
of  large  public  events;  the  fate  otthe  lover  or  the  ad- 
venturer  is~irivo1ved  with  battles  and  diplomacies,  with 
the  rise  and  fall  of  kings,  dynasties,  political  parties, 
nations.  Stevenson  says,  comparing  Fielding  with  Scott, 
that  "  in  the  work  of  the  latter  ...  we  become  suddenly 

»  conscious  of  the  background.  ...  It  is  curious  enough 
to  think  that  *  Tom  Jones'  is  laid  in  the  year  '45,  and 
that  the  only  use  he  makes  of  the  rebellion  is  to  throw  a 
troop  of  soldiers  in  his  hero's  way."  *  And  it  is  this 
background  which  is,  after  all,  the  important  thing  in 
Scott — the  leading  impression;  the  broad  canvas,  the 
swarm  of  life,  the  spirit  of  the  age,  the  reconstitution  of 

;  an  extinct  society.  This  he  was  able  to  give  with  seem- 
ing ease  and  without  any  appearance  of  "  cram."  Chron- 
icle matter  does  not  lie  about  in  lumps  on  the  surface  of 
his  romance,  but  is  decently  buried  away  in  the  notes. 
In  his  comments  on  "  Queenhoo  Hall "  he  adverts  to  the 
danger  of  a  pedantic  method;  and  in  his  "Journal" 
(October  18th,  1826)  he  writes  as  follows  of  his  own  nu- 
merous imitators:  "They  have  to  read  old  books  and 
consult  antiquarian  collections,  to  get  their  knowledge. 
I  write  because  I  have  long  since  read  such  works  and 
possess,  thanks  to  a  strong  memory,  the  information  which 
they  have  to  seek  for.  This  leads  to  a  dragging  in  his- 
torical details  by  head  and  shoulders,  so  that  the  interest 
of  the  main  piece  is  lost  In  minute  description  of  events 
which  do  not  affect  its  progress." 

Of  late  the  recrudescence  of  the  historical  novel  has 
revived  the  discussion  as  to  the  value  of  the  getire.     It 

*  "Familiar  Studies  of  Men  and  Books,"  by  R.  L.  Steven- 
son.    Article,  "Victor  Hugo's  Romances." 


Walter  Scott.  33 

may  be  readily  admitted  that  Scott's  best  work  is  realis- 
tic, and  is  to  be  looked  for  in  such  novels  as  "  The  An- 
tiquary," "  Old  Mortality,"  "  The  Heart  of  Mid-Lothian,"  - 
and  in  characters  like  Andrew  Fairservice,  Bailie  Nicol 
Jarvie,  Dandie  Dinmont,  Dugald  Dalgetty,  Jeanie  Deans, 
Edie  Ochiltrie,  which  brought  into  play  his  knowledge 
of  men,  his  humour,  observation  of  life,  and  insight  into 
Scotch  human  nature.  Scott  knew  these  people;  he  had 
to  divine  James  I.,  Louis  XL,  and  Mary  Stuart,  3kh&, 
historical  novel  is  ajgur  de  force.  Exactly  how  knights- 
templars,  burgomasters,  friars,  Saracens,  and  Robin 
Hood  archers  talked  and  acted  in  the  twelfth  century,  we 
cannot  know.  But  it  is  just  because  they  are  strange  to 
our  experience  that  they  are  dear  to  our  imagination. 

The    justification    of    romance    is   its    unfamiliarity 

"strangeness  added  to  beauty" — "the  pleasure  of  sur- 
prise" as  distinguished  from  "the  pleasure  of  recogni- 
tion." Again  and  again  realism  returns  to  the  charge 
and  demands  of  art  that  it  give  us  the  present  and  the 
actual ;  and  again  and  again  the  imagination  eludes  the 
demand  and  makes  an  ideal  world  for  itself  in  the  blue 
distance. 

Two  favourite  arts,  or  artifices,  of  all  romantic  schools, 
are  "  local  colour  "  and  "  the  picturesque."  "  Vers  Tan 
de  grace  1827,"  writes  Prosper  Merimee,  "  j'etais  roman- 
tique.  Nous  disions  aux  classiques ;  vos  Grecs  ne  sont 
pas  des  Grecs,  vos  Romains  ne  sont  pas  des  Romains; 
vous  ne  savez  pas  donner  a.  vos  compositions  la  coukur 
locale.     Point  de  salut  sans  la  couleur  locale."  * 

*"Le  Roman  Historique  a  l'Epoque  Romantique."  Essai 
sur  1' influence  de  Walter  Scott.  Par  Louis  Maigron.  Paris 
(Hachette),    1898,  p.    331,   note.      And  ibid.,    p.    330:    "Au 

'  < 


34  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

As  to  the  picturesque — a  word  that  connotes,  in  its 
critical  uses,  some  quality  in  the  objects  of  sense  which 
strikes  us  as  at  once  novel,  and  characteristic  in  its  nov- 
elty — while  by  no  means  the  highest  of  literary  arts,  it  is 
a  perfectly  legitimate  one.*  Crecy  is  not,  at  bottom,  a 
more  interesting  battle  than  Gettysburg  because  it  was 

lieu  que  les  classiques  s'efforcaient  toujours,  a  travers  les 
modifications  que  les  pays,  les  temps  et  les  circonstances 
peuvent  apporter  aux  sentiments  et  aux  passions  des  hommes, 
d'atteindre  a  ce  que  ces  passions  et  ces  sentiments  conservent 
de  permanent,  d'immuable  et  d'eternel,  c'est  au  contraire  a 
1' expression  de  l'accidentel  et  du  relatif  que  les  novateurs  de- 
vaient  les  efforts  de  leur  art.  Plus  simplement,  a  la  place  de 
la  verite  humaine,  ils  devaient  mettre  la  verite  locale."  Pro- 
fessor Herford  says  that  what  Scott  "has  in  common  with  the 
Romantic  temper  is  simply  the  feeling  for  the  picturesque,  for 
colour,  for  contrast."     "Age  of  Wordsworth,"  p.  121. 

*  De  Quincey  defines  picturesque  as  "the  characteristic 
pushed  into  a  sensible  excess."  The  word  began  to  excite 
discussion  in  the  last  quarter  of  the  eighteenth  century.  See 
vol.  i.,  p.  185,  for  Gilpin's  "Observations  on  Picturesque 
Beauty.  See  also  Uvedale  Price,  "  Essays  on  the  Picturesque 
as  Compared  with  the  Sublime  and  the  Beautiful,"  three 
vols.,  1794-96.  Price  finds  the  character  of  the  picturesque  to 
consist  in  roughness,  irregularity,  intricacy,  and  sudden  vari- 
ation. Gothic  buildings  are  more  picturesque  than  Grecian, 
and  a  ruin  than  an  entire  building.  Hovels,  cottages,  mills, 
interiors  of  old  barns  are  picturesque.  "  In  mills  particularly, 
such  is  the  extreme  intricacy  of  the  wheels  and  the  wood 
work  :  such  is  the  singular  variety  of  forms  and  of  lights  and 
shadows,  of  mosses  and  weather  stains  from  the  constant 
moisture,  of  plants  springing  from  the  rough  joints  of  the 
stones — that,  even  without  the  addition  of  water,  an  old  mill 
has  the  greatest  charm  for  a  painter"  (i.,  55).  He  mentions, 
as  a  striking  example  of  picturesque  beauty,  a  hollow  lane  or 
by-road  with  broken  banks,  thickets,  old  neglected  pollards, 
fantastic  roots  bared  by  the  winter  torrents,  tangled  trailers 
and  wild  plants,  and  infinite  variety  of  tints  and  shades  (i.. 
23-29) .  He  denounces  the  improvements  of  Capability  Brown 
(see  "Romanticism,"  vol.  i./p.  124)  :  especially  the  clump, 
the  belt  and  regular  serpentine  walks  with  smooth  turf  edges, 
the  made  water  with  uniformly  sloping  banks — all  as  insip- 
idly formal,  in  their  way,  as  the  old  Italian  gardens  which 
Brown's  landscapes  displaced. 


I 


Walter  Scott.  35 

fought  with  bows  and  arrows,  but  it  is  more  picturesque 
to  the  modern  imagination  just  for  that  reason.  Why 
else  do  the  idiots  in  "  MacArthur's  Hymn "  complain 
that  "  steam  spoils  romance  at  sea  "  ?  Why  did  Ruskin 
lament  when  the  little  square  at  the  foot  of  Giotto's  Tower 
in  Florence  was  made  a  stand  for  hackney  coaches? 
Why  did  our  countryman  Halleck  at  Alnwick  Towers 
resent  the  fact  that  "  the  Percy  deals  in  salt  and  hides, 
the  Douglas  sells  red  herring  "  ?  And  why  does  the  pic- 
turesque tourist,  in  general,  object  to  the  substitution  of 
naphtha  launches  for  gondolas  on  the  Venetian  canals? 
Perhaps  because  the  more  machinery  is  interposed  be- 
tween man  and  the  thing  he  works  on,  the  more  imper- 
sonal becomes  his  relation  to  nature. 

Carlyle,  in  his  somewhat  grudging  estimate  of  Scott,  | 
declares  that  "much  of  the  interest  of  these  novels  results  — ~ 
from  contrasts  of  costume.  The  phraseology,  fashion  of 
arms,  of  dress,  of  life  belonging  to  one  age  is  brought 
suddenly  with  singular  vividness  before  the  eyes  of  an- 
other. A  great  effect  this ;  yet  by  the  very  nature  of  it  an 
altogether  temporary  one.  Consider,  brethren,  shall  not 
we  too  one  day  be  antiques  and  grow  to  have  as  quaint  a 
costume  as  the  rest?  .  .  .  Not  b)r  slashed  breeches, 
steeple  hats,  buff  belts,  or  antiquated  speech  can  romance- 
heroes  continue  to  interest  us;  but  simply  and  solely,  in 
the  long  run,  by  being  men.  Buff  belts  and  all  manner 
of  jerkins  and  costumes  are  transitory;  man  alone 
perennial."  *  Carlyle's  dissatisfaction  with  Scott  arise 
from  the  fact  that  he  was  not  a  missionary  nor  a  transcen 
dental  philosopher,  but  simply  a  teller  of  stories.  Heine 
was  not  troubled  in  the  same  way,  but  he  made  the  iden- 
*  "  Essay  on  Walter  Scott." 


*   is  \ 

;en-VW   T 


36  */l  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

tical  criticism.  "  Like  the  works  of  Walter  Scott,  so  also 
do  Fouque's  romances  of  chivalry*  remind  us  of  the 
fantastic  tapestries  known  as  Gobelins,  whose  rich  texture 
and  brilliant  colors  are  more  pleasing  to  our  eyes  than 
edifying  to  our  souls.  We  behold  knightly  pageantry, 
shepherds  engaged  in  festive  sports,  hand-to-hand  com- 
bats, and  ancient  customs,  charmingly  intermingled.  It 
is  all  very  pretty  and  picturesque,  but  shallow;  brilliant 
superficiality.  Among  the  imitators  of  Fouque,  as  among 
the  imitators  of  Walter  Scott,  this  mannerism  of  portray- 
ing— not  the  inner  nature  of  men  and  things,  but  merely 
the  outward  garb  and  appearance — was  carried  to  still 
greater  extremes.  This  shallow  art  and  frivolous  style  is 
still  [1833]  in  vogue  in  Germany  as  well  as  in  England 
and  France.  ...  In  lieu  of  a  knowledge  of  mankind,  our 
recent  novelists  evince  a  profound  acquaintance  with 
clothes."  f 

*  Andrew  Lang  reminds  us  that,  after  all,  only  three  of  the 
Waverley  Novels  are  "chivalry  romances."  The  following 
are  the  only  numbers  of  the  series  that  have  to  do  with  the 
Middle  Ages  :  "  Count  Robert  of  Paris,"  circa  1090  a.d.  ;  "  The 
Betrothed,"  1 187;  "The  Talisman,"  1193;  "Ivanhoe,"  1194; 
"The  Fair  Maid  of  Perth,"  1402;  "Quentin  Durward,"  1470; 
"Anne  of  Geierstein,"  1474-77. 

f  "  The  Romantic  School  in  Germany, "  p.  187.  Cf.  Stendhal, 
"Walter  Scott  et  la  Princesse  de  Cleves."  "Mes  reflexions 
seront  mal  accueilles.  Une  immense  troupe  de  litterateurs 
est  interessee  a  porter  aux  nues  Sir  Walter  Scott  et  sa  mani- 
ere.  L' habit  et  le  collier  de  cuivre  d'un  serf  du  moyen  age 
sont  plus  facile  a  decrire  que  les  mouvements  du  cceur  hu- 
main.  .  .  .  N'oublions  pas  un  autre  avantage  de  l'ecole  de 
Sir  Walter  Scott :  la  description  d'un  costume  et  la. pose  d'un 
personnage  .  .  .  prennent  au  moins  deux  pages.  Les  mouve- 
ments de  l'ame  fourniraient  a  peine  quelques  lignes.  Ouvrez 
au  hazard  un  des  volumes  de  la  '  Princesse  de  Cleves, '  prenez 
dix  pages  au  hasard,  et  ensuite  comparez  les  aux  dix  pages 
d"  Ivanhoe  '  ou  de  '  Quentin  Durward  '  :  ces  derniers  ouvrages 
ont  un  mdrite  historique.     lis  apprennent  quelques  petites 


Walter  Scott.  37 

Elsewhere  Heine  acknowledges  a  deeper  reason  for 
the  popularity  of  the  Scotch  novels.  "  Their  theme  .  .  . 
is  the  mighty  sorrow  for  the  loss  of  national  peculiarities 
swallowed  up  in  the  universality  of  the  newer  culture — 
a  sorrow  which  is  now  throbbing  in  the  hearts  of  all  peo- 
ples. For  national  memories  lie  deeper  in  the  human 
breast  than  is  generally  thought."  But  whatever  rank 
may  be  ultimately  assigned  to  the  historical  novel  as  an 
art  form,  Continental  critics  are^at  one  with  the  British 
in  crediting  its  invention  to  Scott.y  "It  is  an  error,"  says 
Heine,  "not  to  recognise  Walter  Scott  as  the  founder  of 
the  so-called  historical  romance,  and  to  endeavour  to 
trace  it  to  German  imitation,"  He  adds  that  Scott  was  a 
Protestant,  a  lawyer  and  a  Scotchman,  accustomed  to 
action  and  debate,  in  whose  works  the  aristocratic  and 
democratic  elements  are  in  wholesome  balance;  "where- 
as our  German  romanticists  eliminated  the  democratic 
element  entirely  from  their  novels,  and  returned  to  the 
ruts  of  those  crazy  romances  of  knight-errantry  that  flour- 

choses  sur  l'bistoire  aux  gens  qui  l'ignorent  cm  qui  le  savent 
mal.  Ce  merite  historique  a  cause  un  grand  plaisir :  je  ne  le 
nie  pas,  mais  c'est  ce  merite  historique  qui  se  fanera  le  pre- 
mier. .  .  .  Dans  146  ans,  Sir  Walter  Scott  ne  sera  pas  a  la 
hauteur  ou  Corneille  nous  apparait  146  ans  apres  sa  mort." 
"To  write  a  modern  romance  of  chivalry,"  says  Jeffrey,  in  his 
review  of  "Marmion  "  in  the  Edinburgh*  "seems  to  be  much 
such  a  phantasy  as  to  build  a  modern  abbey  or  an  English 
pagoda.  .  .  .  [Scott's]  genius,  seconded  by  the  omnipo- 
tence of  fashion,  has  brought  chivalry  again  into  temporary 
favor.  Fine  ladies  and  gentlemen  now  talk,  indeed,  of 
donjons,  keeps,  tabards,  'scutcheons,  tressures,  caps  of 
maintenance,  portcullises,  wimples,  and  we  know  not  what 
besides ;  just  as  they  did,  in  the  days  of  Dr.  Darwin's  popu- 
larity, of  gnomes,  sylphs,  oxygen,  gossamer,  polygynia,  and 
polyandria.  That  fashion,  however,  passed  rapidly  away, 
and  Mr.  Scott  should  take  care  that  a  different  sort  of  ped- 
antry," etc. 


1 


38  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

ished  before  Cervantes."  *  "  Quel  est  l'ouvrage  litte- 
raire,"  asks  Stendhal  in  1823, t  "  ^  a  ^e  Plus  reussi  en 
France  depuis  dix  ans?  Les  romans  de  Walter  Scott. 
...  On  s'est  moque  a  Paris  pendant  vingt  ans  du  roman 
historique;  l'Acade'mie  a  prouve  doctement  le  ridicule  de 
ce  genre;  nous  y  croyions  tous,  lorsque  Walter  Scott  a 
paru,  son  Waverley  a  la  main ;  et  Balantyne,  son  libraire 
vient  de  mourir  millionaire."  J 

Lastly  the  service  of  the  Waverley  Novels  to  history 
was  an  important  one.  Palgrave  says  that  historical  fic- 
tion is  the  mortal  enemy  of  history,  and  Leslie  Stephen 
adds  that  it  is  also  the  enemy  of  fiction.  In  a  sense  both 
sayings  are  true.  Scott  was  not  always  accurate  as  to 
facts  and  sinned  freely  against  chronology.  But  he 
rescued  a  wide  realm  from  cold  oblivion  and  gave  it 
back  to  human  consciousness  and  sympathy.  It  is  treat- 
ing the  past  more  kindly  to  misrepresent  it  in  some  par- 
ticulars, than  to  leave  it  a  blank  to  the  imagination. 
The  eighteenth-century  historians  were  incurious  of  life. 
Their  spirit  was  general  and  abstract;  they  were  in  search 
of  philosophical  formulas.  Gibbon  covers  his  subject 
with  a  lava-flood  of  stately  rhetoric  which  stiffens  into  a 
uniform  stony  coating  over  the  soft  surface  of  life.  Scott 
is  primarily  responsible  for  that  dramatic,  picturesque 


*For  an  exhaustive  review  of  Scott' s  influence  on  the  evo- 
lution of  historical  fiction  in  France,  consult  Maigron,  "Le 
Roman  Historique, "  etc.  A  longish  passage  from  this  work 
will  be  found  at  the  end  of  the  present  chapter.  For  English 
imitators  and  successors  of  the  Waverley  Novels,  see  Cross, 
"Development  of  the  English  Novel,"  pp.  136-48.  See  also 
De  Quincey's  "Literary  Reminiscences,"  vol.  iii.,  for  an 
amusing  account  of  "Walladmor"  (1824),  a  pretended  Ger- 
man translation  of  a  non-existent  Waverley  novel. 

f  M  Racine  et  Shakespeare. "  %  "  Don  Quixote. " 


Walter  Scott.  39 

c 

treatment  of  history  which  we  find  in  Michelet  and  Car- 
lyle.  "These  historical  novels,"  testifies  Carlyle,  "have 
taught  all  men  this  truth,  which  looks  like  a  truism,  and 
yet  was  as  good  as  unknown  to  writers  of  history  and 
others,  till  so  taught;  that  the  bygone  ages  of  the  world 
were  actually  filled  by  living  men,  not  by  protocols,  state, 
papers,  controversies,  and  abstractions  of  men.  ...  It  is 
a  great  service,  fertile  in  consequences,  this  that  Scott  <l 
has  done;  a  great  truth  laid  open  by  him."  *  In  France, 
too,  historians  like  Barante  and  Augustin  Thierry,  were 
Scott's  professed  disciples.  The  latter  confesses,  in  a 
well-known  passage,  that  "  Ivanhoe  "  was  the  inspirer  of 
his  "Conquete  d'Angleterre,"  and  styles  the  novelist  "le 
plus  grand  maitre  qu'il  y  ait  jamais  eu  en  fait  de  divi- 
nation historique."  f 

Scott  apprehended  the  Middle  Ages  on  their  spectacu- 
lar, and  more  particularly,  their  military  side.  He  ex- 
hibits their  large,  showy  aspects:  battles,  processions, 
hunts,  feasts  in  hall,  tourneys,^  sieges,  and  the  like.  The 
motley  mediaeval  world  swarms  in  his  pages,  from  the  } 
king  on  his  throne  down  to  the  jester  with  his  cap  and 
bells.  But  it  was  the  outside  of  it  that  he  saw;  the  noise, 
bustle,  colour,  stirring  action  that  delighted  him.  Into  its 
spiritualities  he  did  not  penetrate  far;  its  scholasticisms, 
strange  casuistries,  shuddering  faiths,  grotesque  distor- 


I 


*"Sir  Walter  Scott." 

Dix  ans  d' etudes  historiques"  :  preface. 

Walter  Bagehot  says  that  "Ivanhoe  "  "describes  the  Mid- 
dle Ages  as  we  should  have  wished  them  to  be,"  ignoring 
their  discomforts  and  harsh  barbarism.  "Every  boy  has 
heard  of  tournaments  and  has  a  firm  persuasion  that  in  an 
age  of  tournaments  life  was  thoroughly  well  understood.  A 
martial  society  where  men  fought  hand  to  hand  on  good 
horses  with  large  lances,"  etc.  ("The  Waverley  Novels"). 


40  <A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

tions  of  soul;  its  religious  mysticisms,  asceticisms, 
agonies;  the  ecstactic  reveries  of  the  cloister,  terrors  of 
hell,  and  visions  of  paradise.  It  was  the  literature  of 
the  knight,  not  of  the  monk,  that  appealed  to  him.  He 
felt  the  awfulness  and  the  beauty  of  Gothic  sacred  archi- 
tecture and  of  Catholic  ritual.  The  externalities  of  the 
mediaeval  church  impressed  him,  whatever  was  pictur- 
esque in  its  ceremonies  or  august  in  its  power.  He  pic- 
tured effectively  such  scenes  as  the  pilgrimage  to  Melrose 
in  the  "Lay";  the  immuring  of  the  renegade  nun  in 
"  Marmion " ;  the  trial  of  Rebecca  for  sorcery  by  the 
Grand  Master  of  the  Temple  in  "  Ivanhoe."  Ecclesiasti- 
cal figures  abound^n  his  pages,  jolly  friars,  holy  hermits, 
lordly  prelates,  grim  inquisitors,  abbots,  priors,  and 
priests  of  all  descriptions,  but  all  somewhat  conventional 
and  viewed  ab  extra.  He  could  not  draw  a  saint.*  Sigr 
nificant,  therefore,  is  his  indifference  to  Dante,  the  poet 
par  excellence  of  the  Catholic  Middle  Age,  the  epitomizer 
of  mediaeval  thought.  "  The  plan  "  of  the  "  Divine  Com- 
edy," "appeared  to  him  unhappy;  the  personal  malignity 
and  strange  mode  of  revenge  presumptuous  and  uninter- 
esting." Scott's  genius  was  antipathetic  to  Dante's;  and 
he  was  as  incapable  of  taking  a  lasting  imprint  from  his 
intense,  austere,  and  mystical  spirit,  as  from  the  nebulous 
gloom  of  the  Ossianic  poetry.  Though  conservative,  he 
was  not  reactionary  after  the  fashion  of  the  German 
"  throne-and-altar  "  romanticists,  but  remained  always  a 
good  Church  of  England  man  and  an  obstinate  opponent 


*"Of  enthusiasm  in  religion  Scott  always  spoke  very  se- 
verely. ...  I  do  not  think  there  is  a  single  study  in  all  his 
romances  of  what  may  be  fairly  called  a  pre-eminently  spiri- 
tual character"  (R.  H.  Hutton :  "Sir  Walter  Scott,"  p.  126). 


Walter  Scott  41 

of  Catholic  emancipation.*  "Creeds  are  data  in  his 
novels,"  says  Bagehot;  "people  have  different  creeds, 
but  each  keeps  his  own." 

Scott's  interest  in  popular  superstitions  was  constant. 
As  a  young  man — in  his  German  ballad  period — they 
affected  his  imagination  with  a  "  pleasing  horror."  But 
as  he  grew  older,  they  engaged  him  less  as  a  poet  than 
as  a  student  of  Cultur  geschichte. 

A  wistful  sense  of  the  beauty  of  these  old  beliefs — a 
rational  smile  at  their  absurdity — such  is  the  tone  of  his 
"Letters  on  Demonology  and  Witchcraft"  (1830),  a  pas- 
sage or  two  from  which  will  give  his  attitude  very  pre- 
cisely; an  attitude,  it  will  be  seen,  which  is  after  all  not 
so  very  different  from  Addison's,  allowing  for  the  dis- 
tance in  time  and  place,  and  for  Scott's  livelier  imagina- 
tion, f     Scott  had  his  laugh  at  Mrs.  Radcliffe,  and  in  his 

*"  Unopposed,  the  Catholic  superstition  may  sink  to  dust, 
with  all  its  absurd  ritual  and  solemnities.  Still  it  is  an  awful 
risk.  The  world  is  in  fact  as  silly  as  ever,  and  a  good  com- 
petence of  nonsense  will  always  find  believers"  ("Diary" 
for  1829). 

t  See  vol.  i.,  p.  42.  "We  almost  envy  the  credulity  of 
those  who,  in  the  gentle  moonlight  of  a  summer  night  in  Eng- 
land, amid  the  tangled  glades  of  a  deep  forest,  or  the  turfy 
swell  of  her  romantic  commons,  could  fancy  they  saw  the 
fairies  tracing  their  sportive  ring.  But  it  is  in  vain  to  regret 
illusions  which,  however  engaging,  must  of  necessity  yield 
their  place  before  the  increase  of  knowledge,  like  shadows  at 
the  advance  of  morn  "  ("Demonology,"  p.  183).  "Tales  of 
ghosts  and  demonology  are  out  of  date  at  forty  years  of  age 
and  upward.  ...  If  I  were  to  write  on  the  subject  at  all,  it 
should  have  been  during  a  period  of  life  when  I  could  have 
treated  it  with  more  interesting  vivacity.  .  .  .  Even  the  pres- 
ent fashion  of  the  world  seems  to  be  ill-suited  for  studies  of 
this  fantastic  nature ;  and  the  most  ordinary  mechanic  has 
learning  sufficient  to  laugh  at  the  figments  which  in  former 
times  were  believed  by  persons  far  advanced  in  the  deepest 
knowledge  of  the  age  "  {Ibid. ,  p.  398). 


42  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

reviews  of  Hoffmann's  "Tales"  and  Maturin's  "Fatal 
Revenge  "  *  he  insists  upon  the  delicacy  with  which  the 
supernatural  must  be  treated  in  an  age  of  disbelief.  His 
own  management  of  such  themes,  however,  though  much 
superior  to  Walpole's  or  Mrs.  Radcliffe's,  has  not  the 
subtle  art  of  Coleridge.  The  White  Lady  of  Avenel, 
e.g.,  in  "The  Abbot,"  is  a  notorious  failure.  There  was 
too  much  daylight  in  his  imagination  for  spectres  to  be 
quite  at  home.  "  The  shapes  that  haunt  thought's  wilder- 
nesses"; the  "night  side  of  things";  the  real  shudder 
are  not  there,  as  in  Hawthorne  or  in  Poe.  Walter  Pater  f 
says  that  Meinhold's  "  Amber  Witch  "  has  more  of  the 
true  romantic  spirit  than  Tieck,  who  was  its  professional 
representative.  On  the  contrary,  it  has  less  of  the  ro- 
mantic spirit,  but  more  of  the  mediaeval  fact.  It  is  a 
literal,  realistic  handling  of  the  witch  superstition,  as 
Balzac's  "Succube,"  in  the  "Contes  Drolatiques"  is  a 
satirical  version  of  similar  material.  But  Tieck's 
"  Marchen  "  are  the  shadows  thrown  by  mediaeval  beliefs 
across  a  sensitive,  modern  imagination,  and  are  in  result, 
therefore,  romantic.  Scott's  dealing  with  subjects  of  the 
kind  is  midway  between  Meinhold  and  Tieck.  He  does 
not  blink  the  ugly,  childish,  stupid,  and  cruel  features 
of  popular  superstition,  but  throws  the  romantic  glamour 
over  them,  precisely  as  he  does  over  his  "Charlie  over 
the  water  "  Jacobites. J 

Again  Scott's  apprehension  of  the  spirit  of  chivalry, 
though  less  imperfect  than  his  apprehension  of  the  spirit 

*  See  vol.  i. ,  pp.  249  and  420. 

\  "Postscript"  to  "Appreciations." 

%  For  the  rarity  of  the  real  romantic  note  in  mediaeval  writ- 
ers see  vol.  i.,  pp.  26-28,  and  Appendix  B  to  the  present 
chapter. 


Walter  Scott.  43 

of  mediaeval  Catholicism,  was  but  partial.  Of  the  themes 
which  Ariosto  sang — 

"le  donne,  i  cavalier,  l'arme,  gli  amori, 
Le  cortesie,  l'audaci  imprese  io  canto" — 

the  northern  Ariosto  sang  bravely  the  arme  and  the 
audaci  imprese  ;  less  confidently  the  amori  and  the  cortesie. 
He  could  sympathise  with  the  knight-errant's  high  sense 
of  honour  and  his  love  of  bold  emprise;  not  so  well  with 
his  service  of  dames.  Mediaeval  courtship  or  "  love- 
drurye,"  the  trembling  self-abasement  of  the  lover  before 
his  lady,  the  fantastic  refinements  and  excesses  of  gal- 
lantry, were  alien  to  Scott's  manly  and  eminently  practi- 
cal turn  of  mind.  It  is  hardly  possible  to  fancy  him 
reading  the  "  Roman  de  la  Rose "  with  patience — he 
thought  "  Troilus  and  Creseyde  "  tedious,  which  Rossetti 
pronounces  the  finest  of  English  love  poems;  or  selecting 
for  treatment  the  story  of  Heloise  or  Tristram  and  Iseult, 
or  of  "  Le  Chevalier  de  la  Charette  " ;  or  such  a  typical 
mediaeval  life  as  that  of  Ulrich  von  Liechtenstein.* 
These  were  quite  as  truly  beyond  his  sphere  as  a  church 
legend  like  the  life  of  Saint  Margaret  or  the  quest  of  the 
Sangreal.  In  the  "  Talisman  "  he  praises  in  terms  only 
less  eloquent  than  Burke's  famous  words,  "that  wild 
spirit  of  chivalry  which,  amid  its  most  extravagant  and 
fantastic  flights,  was  still  pure  from  all  selfish  alloy — 
generous,  devoted,  and  perhaps  only  thus  far  censurable, 
that  it  proposed  objects  and  courses  of  action  inconsistent 
with  the  frailties  and  imperfections  of  man."  In  "  Ivan- 
hoe,"  too,  there  is  something  like  a  dithyrambic  lament 

*  See  "Studies  in  Mediaeval  Life  and  Literature,"  by  Ed- 
ward T.  McLaughlin,  p.  34. 


44  ed  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

over  the  decay  of  knighthood — "The  'scutcheons  have 
long  mouldered  from  the  walls,"  etc. ;  but  even  here,  en- 
thusiasm is  tempered  by  good  sense,  and  Richard  of  the 
Lion  Heart  is  described  as  an  example  of  the  "brilliant 
but  useless  character  of  a  knight  of  romance."  All  this 
is  but  to  say  that  the  picture  of  the  Middle  Age  which 
Scott  painted  was  not  complete.  Still  it  was  more  nearly 
complete  than  has  yet  been  given  by  any  other  hand; 
and  the  artist  remains,  in  Stevenson's  phrase,  "the  king 
of  the  Romantics." 


APPENDIX   A. 

"  Jamais  homme  de  genie  n'a  eu  l'honneur  et  le  bon- 
heur  d'etre  imite  par  plus  d'hommes  de  genie,  si  tous  les 
grands  e'crivains  de  l'e'poque  romantique  depuis  Victor 
Hugo  jusqu'a  Balzac  et  depuis  Alfred  de  Vigny  jusqu'a 
Merimee,  lui  doivent  tous  et  se  sont  tous  glorifies  de 
lui  devoir  quelque  chose.  ...  II  doit  nous  suffire  pour 
l'instant  d'affirmer  que  l'influence  de  Walter  Scott  est  a 
la  racine  meme  des  grandes  ceuvres  qui-  ont  donne  au 
nouveau  genre  tant  d'eclat  dans  notre  litterature;  que 
c'est  elle  qui  les  a  inspirees,  suscitees,  fait  eclore;  que 
sans  lui  nous  n'aurions  ni  *  Hans  d'Islande,'  ni  4  Cinq- 
Mars,'  ni  *  Les  Chouans,'  ni  la  *  Chronique  de  Charles 
IX.,'  ni  *  Notre  Dame  de  Paris,'  .  .  .  Ce  n'est  rien  moins 
que  le  romantisme  lui-meme  dont  elle  a  hate'  l'incubation, 
facilite  l'eclosion,  aide  le  developpement."— Maigron, 
"Le  Roman  Historique,"  p.  143. 

"  II  nous  faut  d'abord  constater  que  c'est  veritablement 
de  Walter  Scott,  et  de  Walter  Scott  seul,  que  commence 
cette  fureur  des  choses  du  moyen  age,  cette  manie  de 


Walter  Scott.  45 

couleur  locale  qui  sevit  avec  tant  d'intensite  quelque 
temps  avant  et  longtemps  apres  1830,  et  done  qu'il  reste, 
au  moins  pour  ce  qui  est  de  la  description,  le  principal 
initiateur  de  la  generation  nouvelle.  Sans  doute  et  de 
toute  part,  cette  resurrection  du  moyen  age  etait  des  long- 
temps  preparee.  Le  *  Genie  du  Christianisme,'  le  *  Cours 
de  litte'rature  dramatique  '  de  Schlegel,  PAllemagne  '  de 
Mme.  de  Stael  avaient  fait  des  mceurs  chretiennes  et 
chevaleresques  le  fondement  et  la  condition  de  renouvelle- 
ment  de  Tart  franc,ais.  Et,  en  effet,  des  1802,  le  moyen 
age  etait  decouvert,  la  cathedrale  gothique  restaurde,  l'art 
chretien  remis  a  la  place  eminente  d'011  il  aurait  fallu  ne 
jamais  le  laisser  choir.  Mais  oh  sont  les  ceuvres  execu- 
tees  d'apres  ce  modele  et  ces  principes?  S'il  est  facile 
d'apercevoir  et  de  determiner  la  cathedrale  religieuse  de 
Chateaubriand,  est  il  done  si  aise  de  distinguer  sa  cathe- 
drale poetique?  .  .  .  Un courant  vigoureux,  que  le*  Genie 
du  Christianisme '  et  les  '  Martyrs '  ont  puissamment 
contribue  a  determiner,  fait  deriver  les  imaginations  vers 
les  choses  gothiques;  volontiers,  l'esprit  francais  se  re- 
tourne  alors  vers  le  passe  comme  vers  la  seule  source  de 
poe'sie;  et  voici  qu'un  etranger  vient  se  faire  son  guide 
et  fait  miroiter,  devant  tous  les  yeux  eblouis,  la  fantas- 
magorie  du  moyen  age,  donjons  et  creneaux,  cuirasses  et 
belles  armures,  haquenees  et  palefrois,  chevaliers  re- 
splendissants  et  mignonnes  et  dedicates  chatelaines.  .  .  . 
Sur  ses  traces,  on  se  precipita  avec  furie  dans  la  voie 
qu'il  venait  subitement  d'elargir.  Ce  moyen  age,  jusqu'a 
lui  si  convoke  et  si  infecond,  devinait  enfin  une  source 
inepuisable  d'emotions  et  de  productions  artistiques. 
La  *  cathedrale '  etait  bien  restauree  cette  fois.  Elle  le 
fut  meme  trop,  et  borda  tropobstinement  tous  les  sentiers 


46  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

litteraires.  Mais  de  cet  exces,  si  vite  fatigant,  c'est 
Walter  Scott  et  non  Chateaubriand,  quoi  qu'il  en  ait  pu 
dire,  qui  reste  le  grand  coupable.  II  fit  plus  que  de- 
couvrir  le  moyen  age;  il  le  mit  a  la  mode  parmi  les 
Francais." — Ibid.,  pp.  195^: 


APPENDIX   B. 

"The  magical  touch  and  the  sense  of  mystery  and  all 
the  things  that  are  associated  with  the  name  romance, 
when  that  name  is  applied  to  *  The  Ancient  Mariner,'  or 
*  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci,'  or  *  The  Lady  of  Shalott,' 
are  generally  absent  from  the  most  successful  romances  of 
the  great  mediaeval  romantic  age.  .  .  .  The  true  roman- 
tic interest  is  very  unequally  distributed  over  the  works 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  there  is  least  of  it  in  the  au- 
thors who  are  most  representative  of  the  '  age  of  chivalry.' 
There  is  a  disappointment  prepared  for  any  one  who 
looks  in  the  greater  romantic  authors  of  the  twelfth  cen- 
tury for  the  music  of  *  The  Faery  Queene '  or  *  La  Belle 
Dame  sans  Merci.'  .  .  .  The  greater  authors  of  the 
twelfth  century  have  more  affinity  to  the  *  heroic  romance  ' 
of  the  school  of  the  *  Grand  Cyrus '  than  to  the  dreams  of 
Spenser  or  Coleridge.  .  .  .  The  magic  that  is  wanting  to 
the  clear  and  elegant  narrative  of  Benoit  and  Chrestien 
will  be  found  elsewhere;  it  will  be  found  in  one  form  in 
the  mystical  prose  of  the  *  Queste  del  St.  Graal  ' — a  very 
different  thing  from  Chrestien's  *  Perceval ' — it  will  be 
found,  again  and  again,  in  the  prose  of  Sir  Thomas 
Malory;  it  will  be  found  in  many  ballads  and  ballad 
burdens,  in  *  William  and  Margaret,'  in  *  Binnorie,'  in 
the  *  Wife  of  Usher's  Well,'  in  the  *  Rime  of  the  Count 


Walter  Scott  47 

Arnaldos,'  in  the  *  Konigskinder ';  it  will  be  found  in  the 
most  beautiful  story  of  the  Middle  Ages,  *  Aucassin  and 
Nicolette,'  one  of  the  few  perfectly  beautiful  stories  in 
the  world." — "  Epic  and  Romance,"  W.  P.  Ker,  London, 

i897,  P-371^ 


CHAPTER   II. 
GolertO(je,  JBowIes,  ano  tbe  ipope  Controversy 

While  Scott  was  busy  collecting  the  fragments  of 
Border  minstrelsy  and  translating  German  ballads,*  two 
other  young  poets,  far  to  the  south,  were  preparing  their 
share  in  the  literary  revolution.  In  those  same  years 
(1795-98)  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  were  wandering  to- 
gether over  the  Somerset  downs  and  along  the  coast  of 
Devon,  catching  glimpses  of  the  sea  towards  Bristol  or 
Linton,  and  now  and  then  of  the  skeleton  masts  and  gos- 
samer sails  of  a  ship  against  the  declining  sun,  like  those 
of  the  phantom  bark  in  "  The  Ancient  Mariner."  The 
first  fruits  of  these  walks  and  talks  was  that  epoch-making 
book,  the  "  Lyrical  Ballads  "  ;  the  first  edition  of  which 
was  published  in  1798,  and  the  second,  with  an  addi- 
tional volume  and  the  famous  preface  by  Wordsworth,  in 
1800.  The  genesis  of  the  work  and  the  allotment  of  its 
parts  were  described  by  Coleridge  himself  in  the  "  Bio- 
graphia  Literaria"  (18 17),  Chapter  XIV. 

M  During  the  first  year  that  Mr.  Wordsworth  and  I  were 
neighbours  our  conversations  turned  frequently  on  the 
two  cardinal  points  of  poetry,  the  power  of  exciting  the 
sympathy  of  the  reader  by  a  faithful  adherence  to  the  truth 

*For  Coleridge's  relations  with  German  romance,  see  vol. 
i.,  pp.  419-21.  For  his  early  interest  in  Percy,  Ossian,  and 
Chatterton,  ibid.,  pp.  299,  328,  368-70. 

48 


Coleridge,  Howies,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     49 

of  nature,  and  the  power  of  giving  the  interest  of  novelty  by 
the  modifying  colours  of  imagination.  .  .  .  The  thought 
suggested  itself  that  a  series  of  poems  might  be  composed 
of  two  sorts.  In  the  one,  the  incidents  and  agents  were 
to  be,  in  part  at  least,  supernatural ;  .  .  .  for  the  second 
class,  subjects  were  to  be  chosen  from  ordinary  life.  .  .  . 
It  was  agreed  that  my  endeavours  should  be  directed  to 
persons  and  characters  supernatural,  or  at  least  romantic. 
.  .  .  With  this  view  I  wrote  *  The  Ancient  Mariner,'  and 
was  preparing,  among  other  poems,  *  The  Dark  Ladie ' 
and  the  *  Christabel,'  in  which  I  should  have  more  nearly 
realized  my  ideal  than  I  had  done  in  my  first  attempt." 

Coleridge's  contributions  to  romantic  poetry  are  few 
though  precious.  Weighed  against  the  imposing  array  of 
Scott's  romances  in  prose  and  verse,*  they  seem  like 
two  or  three  little  gold  coins  put  into  the  scales  to  bal- 
ance a  handful  of  silver  dollars.  He  stands  for  so  much 
in  the  history  of  English  thought,  he  influenced  his  own 
and  the  following  generation  on  so  many  sides,  that  his 
romanticism  shows  like  a  mere  incident  in  his  intellectual 
history.  His  blossoming  time  was  short  at  the  best,  and 
ended  practically  with  the  century.  After  his  return  from 
Germany  in  1799  and  his  settlement  at  Keswick  in  1800, 
he  produced  little  verse  of  any  importance  beyond  the 
second  part  of  "Christabel"  (written  in  1800,  published 
in  1816).  His  creative  impulse  failed  him,  and  he  be- 
came more  and  more  involved  in  theology,  metaphysics, 
political  philosophy,  and  literary  criticism. 

♦"There  is  as  much  difference  between  Coleridge's  brief 
poem  'Christabel'  and  all  the  narrative  poems  of  Walter 
Scott  ...  as  between  a  precious  essence  and  a  coarse  imita- 
tion of  it  got  up  for  sale"  (Leigh  Hunt's  "Autobiography," 
p.  197). 


So  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

It  appears,  therefore,  at  first  sight,  a  little  odd  that 
Coleridge's  German  biographer,  Professor  Brandl,  should 
have  treated  his  subject  under  this  special  aspect,*  and 
attributed  to,  him  so  leading  a  place  in  the  romantic 
movement.  /Walter  Scott,  if  we  consider  his  life-long 
and  wellnigrr  exclusive  dedication  of  himself  to  the  work 
of  historic  restoration — Scott,  certainly,  and  not  Cole- 
ridge was  the  "high  priest  of  Romanticism."  \  t  Brandl  is 
dissatisfied  with  the  term  Lake  School,  or  Lakers,  com- 
monly given  to  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and  Southey,  and 
proposes  instead  to  call  them  the  Romantic  School,  Ro- 
manticists {Romantiker) ,  surely  something  of  a  misnomer 
when  used  of  an  eclectic  versifier  like  Southey,  or  a  poet 
of  nature,  moral  reflection,  and  humble  life  like  Words- 
worth. Southey,  in  casting  about  him  for  a  theme,  some- 
times became  for  the  nonce  and  so  far  as  subject  goes,  a 
romancer;  as  in  "  Joan  of  Arc  "  (1799),  "  Madoc  "  (1805), 
and  "Roderick  the  Goth"  (1814);  not  to  speak  of  trans- 
lations like  "  Amadis  of  Gaul,"  "  Palmerin  of  England," 
and  "The  Chronicle  of  the  Cid."  But  these  were  not 
due  to  the  compelling  bent  of  his  genius,  as  in  Scott. 
They  were  miscellaneous  jobs,  undertaken  in  the  regular 


*  "Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  und  die  Englische  Romantik, " 
Alois  Brandl,  Berlin,   18S6. 

t  It  is  in  view  of  his  critical  attitude,  not  of  his  poetry,  that 
Saintsbury  applies  this  title  to  Coleridge.  "The  attitude  was 
that  of  a  medievalism  inspired  by  much  later  learning,  but 
still  more  by  that  intermediate  or  decadent  Greek  philosophy 
which  had  so  much  influence  on  the  Middle  Ages  themselves. 
This  is,  in  other  words,  the  Romantic  attitude,  and  Coleridge 
was  the  high  priest  of  Romanticism,  which,  through  Scott 
and  Byron,  he  taught  to  Europe,  repreaching  it  even  to  Ger- 
many, from  which  it  had  partly  come  "  ("A  Short  History  of 
English  Literature,"  by  George  Saintsbury,  London,  1898, 
p.  656). 


Coleridge,  Howies,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     5 1 

course  of  his  business  as  a  manufacturer  of  big,  irregu- 
lar epics,  Oriental,  legendary,  mythological,  and  what 
not;  and  as  an  untiring  biographer,  editor,  and  hack 
writer  of  all  descriptions.  Southey  was  a  mechanical 
poet,  with  little  original  inspiration,  and  represents  noth- 
ing in  particular.  Wordsworth  again,  though  innovating 
in  practice  and  theory  against  eighteenth-century  tradi- 
tion, is  absolutely  unromantic  in  contrast  with  Scott  and 
Coleridge. 

But  it  will  be  fair  to  let  the  critic  defend  his  own 
nomenclature;  and  the  passage  which  I  shall  quote  will 
serve  not  only  as  another  attempt  to  define  romanticism, 
but  also  to  explain  why  Brandl  regards  the  Lake  poets  as 
our  romantic  school  par  excellence.  " '  Lake  School '  is  a 
name,  but  no  designation.  This  was  felt  in  England, 
where  many  critics  have  accordingly  fallen  into  the  oppo- 
site extreme,  and  maintained  that  the  members  of  this 
group  of  poets  had  nothing 'in  common  beyond  their  per- 
sonal and  accidental  conditions.  As  if  they  had  only 
lived  together,  and  not  worked  together!  In  truth  they 
were  bound  together  by  many  a  strong  tie,  and  above  all 
by  one  of  a  polemical  kind,  namely,  by  the  aversion  for 
the  monotony  that  had  preceded  them,  and  by  the  strug- 
gle against  merely  dogmatic  rules.  Unbending  uniform- 
ity is  death !  Let  us  be  various  and  individual  as  life 
itself  is.  .  .  .  Away  with  dry  Rationalism !  Let  us  fight 
it  with  all  the  powers  we  possess;  whether  by  bold  Pla- 
tonism  or  simple  Bible  faith;  whether  by  enthusiastic 
hymns,  or  dreamy  fairy  tales;  whether  by  the  fabulous 
world  of  distant  times  and  zones,  or  by  the  instincts  of 
the  children  in  the  next  village.  Let  us  abjure  the  ever- 
recommended  nostrum  of  imitation  of  the  old  masters  in 


52  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

poetry,  and  rather  attach  ourselves  to  homely  models,  and 
endeavour,  with  their  help,  lovingly  and  organically  to 
develop  their  inner  life.  These  were  the  aims  of  Walter 
Scott  and  his  Scotch  school,  only  with  such  changes  as 
local  differences  demanded.  Individuality  in  person, 
nationality,  and  subject,  and  therefore  the  emphasis  of  all 
natural  unlikeness,  was  the  motto  on  both  sides  of  the 
Tweed.  And,  as  these  men,  when  confronted  by  ele- 
ments peculiar,  rare,  and  marvellous,  designated  such 
elements  as  *  romantic,'  so  may  they  themselves  be  justly 
called  the  *  Romantic  School.'  But  the  term  is  much 
misused,  and  requires  a  little  elucidation.  Shakespeare 
is  usually  called  a  romantic  poet.  He,  however,  never 
used  the  expression,  and  would  have  been  surprised  if 
any  one  had  applied  it  to  him.  The  term  presupposes 
opposition  to  the  classic  style,  to  rhetorical  deduction, 
and  to  measured  periods,  all  of  which  were  unknown  in 
the  time  of  the  Renaissance,  and  first  imported  in  that  of 
the  French  Revolution.  \On  the  other  hand,  Words- 
worth, Coleridge,  Southey,  Lamb,  and /Walter  Scott's  cir- 
cle all  branched  off  from  the  classical  path  with  a  direct- 
ness and  consistency  which  sharply  distinguish  them  from 
their  predecessors,  contemporaries,  and  successors.)  Their 
predecessors  had  not  broken  with  the  Greek  arid  Latin 
school,  nor  with  the  school  of  Pope ;  Chatterton  copied 
Homer;  Cowper  translated  him;  Burns  in  his  English 
verses,  and  Bowles  in  his  sonnets,  adhered  to  what  is 
called  the  *  pig-tail  period ' !  The  principal  poems  com- 
posed in  the  last  decennium  of  the  eighteenth  century 
.  .  .  adhered  still  more  to  classic  tradition.  In  London 
the  satires  of  Mathias  and  Gifford  renewed  the  style  of 
the  *  Dunciad,'  and  the  moral  poems  of  Rogers  that  of 


Coleridge,  'Bowles,  and  the  "Pope  Controversy.     53 

the  *  Essay  on  Man.'  Landor  wrote  his  youthful  *  Gebir ' 
in  the  style  of  Virgil,  and  originally  in  Latin  itself.  The 
amateur  in  German  literature,  William  Taylor  of  Nor- 
wich, and  Dr.  Sayers,  interested  themselves  especially  for 
those  works  by  Goethe  which  bear  an  antique  character 
— for  *  Iphigenia,'  'Proserpina,'  'Alexis  and  Dora.'  Only 
when  the  war  with  France  drew  near  was  the  classical 
feeling  interrupted.  Campbell,  the  Scotchman,  and 
Moore,  the  Irishman,  both  well  schooled  by  translations 
from  the  Greek,  recalled  to  mind  the  songs  of  their  own 
people,  and  rendered  them  popular  with  the  fashionable 
world — though  only  by  clothing  them  in  classic  garb. 
How  different  to,  the  '  artificial  rust ■  of  '  Christabel ';  to,  v 
the  almost  exaggerated  homeliness  of  '  We  Are  Seven  ' ; 
and  to  the  rude  '  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel ' !  When  at\ 
last,  with  the  fall  of  Napoleon,  the  great  stars — Byron,! 
Shelley,  Keats,  and  later  the  mature  Landor — rose  in  the  j 
b  hemisphere,  they  had  all  imbibed  from  the  Romantic 
school  a  warmer  form  of  thought  and  feeling,  and  a  num- 
ber of  productive  impulses;  though,  Euphorion-like,  they 
still  regarded  the  antique  as  their  parent.  They  expressed 
much  appreciation  of  the  Romantic  school,  but  their  hearts 
were  with  yEschykis  and  Pindar.  They  contended  for 
national  character,  but  only  took  pleasure  in  planting  it 
on  classic  soil.  Byron's  enthusiasm  for  Pope  was  not 
only- caprice;  nor  was  it  mere  chance  that  Byron  should 
have  died  in  Greece,  and  Shelley  and  Keats  in  Italy. 
Compared  with  what  we  may  call  these  classical  mem- 
bers of  the  Romantic  school,  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and^ 
fScott  .  .  .  may  be  said  to  have  taken  nothing,  whether 
in  the  form  of  translation  or  imitation,  from  classical 
literature ;)  while  they  drew  endless  inspiration  from  the 


54  *d  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Middle  Ages.  In  their  eyes  Pope  was  only  a  lucid, 
able,  and  clever  journeyman.  It  is  therefore  fair  to  con- 
sider them,  and  them  alone,  as  exponents  of  the  Romantic 
school."  * 

As  to  Byron  and  Shelley  this  criticism  may  do;  as  to 
Chatterton  and  Keats  it  is  misleading.  Wordsworth 
more  romantic  than  Chatterton!  More  romantic  than 
Keats,  because  the  latter  often,  and  Wordsworth  seldom, 
treats  subjects  from  the  antique!  On  the  contrary,  if 
"  the  name  is  graven  on  the  workmanship,"  "  Michael " 
and  "  The  Brothers  "  are  as  classical  as  "  Hyperion  "  or 
"  Laodamia  "  or  "  The  Hamadryad  " ;  "  bald  as  the  bare 
mountain-tops  are  bald,  with  a  baldness  full  of  grandeur." 
Bagehot  expressly  singles  Wordsworth  out  as  an  example 
of  pure  or  classic  art,  as  distinguished  from  the  ornate 
art  of  such  poets  as  Keats  and  Tennyson.  And  Mr. 
Colvin  hesitates  to  classify  him  with  Landor  only  be- 
cause of  his  "  suggestive  and  adumbrative  manner" — not, 
indeed,  he  acknowledges,  a  romantic  manner,  and  yet 
"  quite  distinct  from  the  classical  " ;  i.e.,  because  of  the 
transcendental  character  of  a  portion  of  his  poetry.  But 
whatever  may  be  true  of  the  other  members  of  the  group, 
Coleridge  at  his  best  was  a  romantic  poet.  "  Christabel  " 
and  "The  Ancient  Mariner,"  creations  so  exquisite 
sprung  from  the  contact  of  modern  imagination  with 
mediaeval  beliefs,  are  enough  in  themselves  to  justify  the 
whole  romantic  movement. 

Among  the  literary  influences  which  gave  shape  to 
Coleridge's   poetry,    Percy's    ballads    and    Chatterton's 

*"  Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  and  the  English  Romantic 
School,"  by  Alois  Brandl.  Lady  Eastlake's  translation, 
London,  1887,  pp.  219-23. 


Coleridge,  Bowles,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     55 

"  Rowley  Poems "  are  obvious  and  have  already  been 
mentioned.  In  his  first  volume  of  verse  (1796),  there  is 
manifest  a  still  stronger  impulse  from  the  sonnets  of  the 
Rev.  William  Lisle  Bowles.  We  have  noticed  the  reap- 
pearance of  this  discarded  stanza  form  in  the  work  of 
Gray,  Mason,  Edwards,  Stillingfleet,  and  Thomas  Warton, 
about  the  middle  of  the  last  century.*  In  1782  Mrs. 
Charlotte  Smith  published  a  volume  of  sonnets,  treating 
motives  from  Milton,  Gray,  Collins,  Pope's  "  Eloisa  "  and 
Goethe's  "Werther."  But  the  writer  who — through  his 
influence  upon  Wordsworth  more  especially — contributed 
most  towards  the  sonnet  revival,  was  Bowles.  In  1789  he 
had  published  a  little  collection  of  fourteen  sonnets,f 
which  reached  a  second  edition  with  six  pieces  additional, 
in  the  same  year.  "  His  sonnets  came  into  Wordsworth's 
hands  (1793),"  says  Brandl,  "just  as  he  was  leaving 
London  with  some  friends  for  a  morning's  excursion ;  he 
seated  himself  in  a  recess  on  Westminster  Bridge,  and 
was  not  to  be  moved  from  his  place  till  he  had  finished 
the  little  book.  Southey,  again,  owned  in  1832  that  for 
forty  years,  he  had  taken  the  sweet  and  artless  style  of 
Bowles  for  a  model."  J  In  the  first  chapter  of  his  "  Bio- 
graphia  Literaria"  (1817)  Coleridge  tells  how,  when  he 
had  just  entered  on  his  seventeenth  year,  "the  sonnets  of 
Mr.  Bowles,  twenty  in  number  and  just  then  published  in 
a  quarto  pamphlet,  were  first  made  kriown  and  presented  " 
to  him  by  his  school-fellow  at  Christ's  Hospital,  Thomas 

*  See  vol.  i.,  pp.  160-61. 

f "  Fourteen  Sonnets,  written  chiefly  on  Picturesque 
Spots,"  Bath,  17S9. 

%  "Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge,"  p.  37.  Cf.  Wordsworth's 
Sonnets  " Upon  Westminster  Bridge"  (1802)  and  "Scorn  Not 
the  Sonnet. " 


56  <iA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

Middleton,  afterwards  Bishop  of  Calcutta.  "  It  was  a 
double  pleasure  to  me  .  .  .  that  I  should  have  received, 
from  a  friend  so  revered,  the  first  knowledge  of  a  poet 
by  whose  works,  year  after  year,  I  was  so  enthusiastically 
delighted  and  inspired.  My  earliest  acquaintances  will 
not  have  forgotten  the  undisciplined  eagerness  and  im- 
petuous zeal  with  which  I  laboured  to  make  proselytes, 
not  only  of  my  companions,  but  of  all  with  whom  I  con- 
versed, of  whatever  rank  and  in  whatever  place.  As  my 
school  finances  did  not  permit  me  to  purchase  copies,  I 
made,  within  less  than  a  year  and  a  half,  more  than  forty 
transcriptions,  as  the  best  presents  I  could  offer  to  those 
who  had  in  any  way  won  my  regard.  And  with  almost 
equal  delight  did  I  receive  the  three  or  four  following 
publications  of  the  same  author."  To  Bowles'  poems 
Coleridge  ascribes  the  credit  of  having  withdrawn  him 
from  a  too  exclusive  devotion  to  metaphysics  and  also  a 
strengthened  perception  of  the  essentially  unpoetic  char- 
acter of  Pope's  poetry.  "  Among  those  with  whom  I  con- 
versed there  were,  of  course,  very  many  who  had  formed 
their  taste  and  their  notions  of  poetry  from  the  writings 
of  Pope  and  his  followers;  or,  to  speak  more  generally, 
in  that  school  of  French  poetry,  condensed  and  invigo- 
rated by  English  understanding,  which  had  predominated 
from  the  last  century.  I  was  not  blind  to  the  merits  of 
this  school,  yet  .  .  .  they  gave  me  little  pleasure.  .  .  . 
I  saw  that  the  excellence  of  this  kind  consisted  in  just 
and  acute  observations  on  men  and  manners  in  an  artifi- 
cial state  of  society,  as  its  matter  and  substance;  and  in 
the  logic  of  wit,  conveyed  in  smooth  and  strong  epigram- 
matic couplets,  as  its  form.  .  .  .  The  matter  and  diction 
seemed   to   me   characterized    not   so   much   by   poetic 


Coleridge,  Howies,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     57 

thoughts  as  by  thoughts  translated  into  the  language  of 
poetry."  Coleridge  goes  on  to  say  that,  in  a  paper  written 
during  a  Cambridge  vacation,  he  compared  Darwin's 
"Botanic  Garden"  to  a  Russian  ice  palace,  "glittering, 
cold,  and  transitory  " ;  that  he  expressed  a  preference  for 
Collins'  odes  over  those  of  Gray;  and  that  in  his  "de- 
fence of  the  lines  running  into  each  other,  instead  of 
closing  at  each  couplet;  and  of  natural  language  .  .  . 
such  as  /  will  remember  thee,  instead  of 

.  .  .  Thy  image  on  her  wing 
Before  my  fancy's  eye  shall  memory  bring" 

he  had  continually  to  appeal  to  the  example  of  the  older 
English  poets  from  Chaucer  to  Milton.  "The  reader," 
he  concludes,  "must  make  himself  acquainted  with  the 
general  style  of  composition  that  was  at  that  time  deemed 
poetry,  in  order  to  understand  and  account  for  the  effect 
produced  on  me  by  the  sonnets,  the  *  Monody  at  Matlock' 
and  the  '  Hope '  of  Mr.  Bowles ;  for  it  is  peculiar  to  origi- 
nal genius  to  become  less  and  less  striking,  in  proportion 
to  its  success  in  improving  the  taste  and  judgment  of  its 
contemporaries.  The  poems  of  West,  indeed,  had  the 
merit  of  chaste  and  manly  diction,  but  they  were  cold, 
and,  if  I  may  so  express  it,  only  dead-coloured;  while  in 
the  best  of  Warton's,  there  is  a  stiffness  which  too  often 
gives  them  the  appearance  of  imitations  from  the  Greek. 
Whatever  relation,  therefore,  of  cause  or  impulse,  Percy's 
collection  of  ballads  may  bear  to  the  most  popular  poems 
of  the  present  day,  yet  in  the  more  sustained  and  elevated 
style  of  the  then  living  poets,  Cowper  and  Bowles  were,  to 
the  best  of  my  knowledge,  the  first  who  combined  natural 
thoughts  with  natural  diction ;    the  first  who  reconciled 


58  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

the  heart  with  the  head."  Coleridge  adds  in  a  note  that 
he  was  not  familiar  with  Cowper's  "Task"  till  many 
years  after  the  publication  of  Bowles'  sonnets,  though  it 
had  been  published  before  them  (1785). 

It  would  be  hard  to  account  for  the  effect  of  Bowles' 
sonnets  on  Coleridge,  did  we  not  remember  that  it  is  not 
necessarily  the  greatest  literature  that  comes  home  to  us 
most  intimately,  but  that  which,  for  some  reason,  touches 
us  where  we  are  peculiarly  sensitive.  It  is  a  familiar 
experience  with  every  reader,  that  certain  books  make  an 
appeal  to  him  which  is  personal  and  individual,  an  ap- 
peal which  they  make  to  few  other  readers — perhaps  to 
no  other  reader — and  which  no  other  books  make  to  him. 
It  is  something  in  them  apart  from  their  absolute  value 
or  charm,  or  rather  it  is  something  in  him,  some  private 
experience  of  his  own,  some  occult  association  in  depths 
below  consciousness.  He  has  a  perfectly  just  estimate 
of  their  small  importance  in  the  abstract;  they  are  not 
even  of  the  second  or  third  rank.  Yet  they  speak  to  him ; 
they  seem  written  to  him — are  more  to  him,  in  a  way, 
than  Shakspere  and  Milton  and  all  the  public  library  of 
the  world.  In  the  line  of  light  bringers  who  pass  from 
hand  to  hand  the  torch  of  intelligential  fire,  there  are 
men  of  most  unequal  stature,  and  a  giant  may  stoop  to 
take  the  precious  flambeau  from  a  dwarf.  That  Scott 
should  have  admired  Monk  Lewis,  and  Coleridge  rever- 
enced Bowles,  only  proves  that  Lewis  and  Bowles  had 
something  to  give  which  Scott  and  Coleridge  were  pecul- 
iarly ready  to  receive. 

Bowles'  sonnets,  though  now  little  read,  are  not  un- 
readable. They  are  tender  in  feeling,  musical  in  verse, 
and  pure  in  diction.     They  were  mostly  suggested  by 


Coleridge,  TSowles,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     59 

natural  scenery,  and  are  uniformly  melancholy.  Bowles 
could  suck  melancholy  out  of  a  landscape  as  a  weasel 
sucks  eggs.  His  sonnets  continue  the  elegiac  strain  of 
Shenstone,  Gray,  Collins,  Warton,  and  the  whole  "II 
Penseroso "  school,  but  with  a  more  personal  note,  ex- 
plained by  a  recent  bereavement  of  the  poet.  "  Those 
who  know  him,"  says  the  preface,  "  know  the  occasions 
of  them  to  have  been  real;  to  the  public  he  might  only 
mention  the  sudden  death  of  a  deserving  young  woman 
with  whom 

Sperabat  longos  heu  !  ducere  soles, 
Et  fido  acclinis  consumuisse  sinu.  .  .  . 

This  is  nothing  to  the  public;  but  it  may  serve  in  some 
measure  to  obviate  the  common  remark  on  melancholy 
poetry,  that  it  has  been  very  often  gravely  composed,  when 
possibly  the  heart  of  the  writer  had  very  little  share  in 
the  distress  he  chose  to  describe.  But  there  is  a  great 
difference  between  natural  and  fabricated  feelings  even 
in  poetry."  Accordingly  while  the  Miltonic  group  of 
last-century  poets  went  in  search  of  dark  things — grots, 
caverns,  horrid  shades,  and  twilight  vales;  Bowies'  mood 
bestowed  its  color  upon  the  most  cheerful  sights  and 
sounds  of  nature.  The  coming  of  summer  or  spring; 
the  bells  of  Oxford  and  Ostend ;  the  distant  prospect  of 
the  Malvern  Hills,  or  the  chalk  cliffs  of  Dover;  sunrise 
on  the  sea,  touching  "  the  lifted  oar  far  off  with  sudden 
gleam  " ;  these  and  the  like  move  him  to  tears  equally 
with  the  glimmer  of  evening,  the  sequestered  woods  of 
Wensbeck,  the  ruins  of  Netley  Abbey,*  or  the  frowning 
battlements  of  Bamborough  Castle,  where 

*  Cf.  vol.  i.,  p.  182. 


60  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

"  Pity,  at  the  dark  and  stormy  hour 
Of  midnight,  when  the  moon  is  hid  on  high, 
Keeps  her  lone  watch  upon  the  topmost  tower. " 

In  "  English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers  "  Byron  calls 

Bowles    "the  maudlin  prince  of  mournful  sonneteers," 

whose 

"...  muse  most  lamentably  tells 
What  merry  sounds  proceed  from  Oxford  bells."  * 

Bowies'  attitude  had  thus  something  more  modern  than 
that  of  the  eighteenth-century  elegiacs,  and  in  unison 
with  Coleridge's  doctrine,  that 

"...  we  receive  but  what  we  give, 
And  in  our  life  alone  does  nature  live  : 
Ours  is  her  wedding  garment,  ours  her  shroud."  f 

A  number  of  Bowles'  sonnets  were  addressed  to  rivers, 
the  Tweed,  the  Cherwell  at  Oxford,  the  Wensbeck,  and 
the  Itchin  near  Winton,  poems  which  stand  midway  be- 
tween Thomas  Warton's  "  To  the  River  Lodon  "  and  Cole- 
ridge's "  To  the  River  Otter,"  with  Wordsworth's  sonnet 
sequence,  "On  the  River  Duddon."     A  single  sonnet  of 

*  See  Sonnet  xvii.,  "On  Revisiting  Oxford." 
See  also  Sonnet  xi.,  "At  Ostend  : 

"The  mournful  magic  of  their  mingled  chimes 
First  waked  my  wondrous  childhood  into  tears. " 

And  Cf.  Francis  Mahony's  "The  Bells  of  Shandon" — 

"Whose  sounds  so  wild  would,  in  the  days  of  childhood, 
Fling  round  my  cradle  their  magic  spells." 

And  Moore's  "Those  Evening  Bells."  The  twang  of  the 
wind-harp  also  resounds  through  Bowles'  Sonnets.  See  for 
the  iEolus'  harp,  vol.  i.,  p.  165,  and  Cf.  Coleridge's  poem, 
"The  Eolian  Harp." 

f  "Dejection:  An  Ode  "  (1802). 


Coleridge,  'Bowles,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     61 

Bowles  will  be  enough  to  give  a  taste  of  his  quality  and 
to  show  what  Coleridge  got  from  him.* 

Bowles  was  a  disciple  in  the  "School  of  Warton."  He 
was  "one  of  Joseph  Warton's  Winchester  wonders,"  says 
Peter  Cunningham,  in  a  note  in  the  second  edition  of 
Campbell's  "  Specimens  of  the  British  Poets";  "and  the 
taste  he  imbibed  there  for  the  romantic  school  of  poetry 
was  strengthened  and  confirmed  by  his  removal  to  Trin- 
ity College,  Oxford,  when  Tom  Warton  was  master  there." 
Bowles  was  always  prompt  to  own  that  he  had  learned  his 
literary  principles  from  the  Wartons;  and  among  his 
poems  is  a  monody  written  on  the  death  of  his  old  teacher, 
the  master  of  Winchester  College.  His  verses  abound  in 
Gothic  imagery  quite  in  the  Wartonian  manner;  the 
"  castle  gleaming  on  the  distant  steep  " ;  "  the  pale  moon- 
light in  the  midnight  aisle  " ;  "  some  convent's  ancient 
walls,"  along  the  Rhine.  Weak  winds  complain  like 
spirits  through  the  ruined  arches  of  Netley  Abbey : 

"The  beam 
Of  evening  smiles  on  the  gray  battlement, 
And  yon  forsaken  tower  that  time  has  rent." 

*  SONNET  XX. 
November,  ijq2. 
There  is  strange  music  in  the  stirring  wind 
When  lowers  the  autumnal  eve,  and  all  alone 
To  the  dark  wood's  cold  covert  thou  art  gone 
Whose  ancient  trees,  on  the  rough  slope  reclined, 
Rock,  and  at  times  scatter  their  tresses  sear. 
If  in  such  shades,  beneath  their  murmuring, 
Thou  late  hast  passed  the  happier  hours  of  spring, 
With  sadness  thou  wilt  mark  the  fading  year ; 
Chiefly  if  one  with  whom  such  sweets  at  morn 
Or  eve  thou'st  shared,  to  distant  scenes  shall  stray. 
O  Spring,  return  !  return,  auspicious  May  ! 
But  sad  will  be  thy  coming,  and  forlorn, 
If  she  return  not  with  thy  cheering  ray, 
Who  from  these  shades  is  gone,  gone  far  away." 


62  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

His  lines  on  Shakspere  recall  Collins  in  their  in- 
sistence upon  the  "  elvish  "  things  in  the  plays :  "  The 
Tempest,"  "  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,"  the  weird  sis- 
ters in  "Macbeth,"  Ophelia's  songs,  the  melancholy 
Jacques.  The  lines  to  Burke  on  his  "  Reflections  on  the 
Revolution  in  France,"  echo  his  celebrated  dirge  over 
fallen  chivalry: 

"Though  now  no  more  proud  chivalry  recalls 
The  tourneys  bright  and  pealing  festivals  ; 
Though  now  on  high  her  idle  spear  is  hung, 
Though  time  her  mouldering  harp  has  half  unstrung,"  etc.* 

The  "  Hymn  to  Woden  "  alludes  to  Gray's  "  Fatal  Sis- 
ters." "  St.  Michael's  Mount "  summons  up  the  forms  of 
the  ancient  Druids,  and  sings  how  Fancy, 

"Sick  of  the  fluttering  fancies  that  engage 
The  vain  pursuits  of  a  degenerate  age,  .  .  . 
Would  fain  the  shade  of  elder  days  recall, 
The  Gothick  battlements,  the  bannered  hall ; 
Or  list  of  elfin  harps  the  fabling  rhyme  ; 
Or,  wrapt  in  melancholy  trance  sublime, 
Pause  o'er  the  working  of  some  wondrous  tale, 
Or  bid  the  spectres  of  the  castle  hail !  " 

Bowles'  influence  is  traceable  in  Coleridge's  earliest 
volume  of  verse  (1796)  in  a  certain  diffused  softness  and 
gentle  sensibility.  This  elegiac  tone  appears  particularly 
in  effusions  like  "Happiness,"  "The  Sigh,"  "To  a 
Young  Ass1,"  "To  the  Autumnal  Moon,"  "Lines  on  an 
Autumnal  Evening,"  "To the  Nightingale";  in  "Melan- 
choly: A  Fragment"  and  "Elegy;  imitated  from  Aken- 
side,"  both  in  the  "  Sibylline  Leaves "  (1797);  and  in 
numerous  "lines,"  "monodies,"  "epitaphs,"  "odes,"  and 

*Cf.  Scott's  "Harp  of  the  North,  that  mouldering  long  hast 
hung,"  etc.     "Lady  of  the  Lake,"  Canto  I. 


Coleridge,  Howies,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     63 

"  stanzas."  *  Coleridge  soon  came  to  recognise  the  weak-  r  ** 
ness  of  his  juvenile  verses,  and  parodied  himself — and  c^i 
incidentally  Bowles — in  three  sonnets  printed  at  the 
end  of  Chapter  I.  of  the  "Biographia  Literaria,"  de- 
signed to  burlesque  his  own  besetting  sins,  a  "  doleful 
egotism,"  an  affected  simplicity,  and  the  use  of  "elabo- 
rate and  swelling  language  and  imagery."  He  never 
attained  much  success  in  the  use  of  the  sonnet  form.  A 
series  of  twelve  sonnets  in  his  first  collection  opens  with 
one  to  Bowles : 

"My  heart  has  thanked  thee,  Bowles  !  for  those  soft  strains 
Whose  sadness  soothes  me,  like  the  murmuring 
Of  wild  bees  in  the  sunny  showers  of  spring, "  etc. 

More  important  to  our  inquiries  than  the  poetry  of 
Bowles  is  the  occasion  which  he  gave  to  the  revival,  under 
new  conditions,  of  the  Pope  controversy.  For  it  was  over 
the  body  of  Pope  that  the  quarrel  between  classic  and 
romantic  was  fought  out  in  England,  as  it  was  fought  out 
in  France,  a  few  years  later,  over  the  question  of  the 
dramatic  unities  and  the  mixture  of  tragedy  and  comedy 
in  the  dratne.  In  1806,  just  a  half  century  after  Joseph 
Warton  published  the  first  volume  of  his  "Essay  on 
Pope,"  Bowles'  edition  of  the  same  poet  appeared.  In 
the  life  of  Pope  which  was  prefixed,  the  editor  made 
some  severe  strictures  on  Pope's  duplicity,  jealousy,  and 
other  disagreeable  traits,  though  not  more  severe  than 
have  been  made  by  Pope's  latest  editor,  Mr.  Elwin,  who 
has  backed  up  his  charges  with  an  array  of  evidence 
fairly  overwhelming.     The  edition  contained  likewise  an 

*  "Shall  gentle  Coleridge  pass  unnoticed  here, 
To  turgid  ode  and  tumid  stanza  dear? " 

— "English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers.'" 


64  <A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

essay  on  "The  Poetical  Character  of  Pope,"  in  which 
Bowles  took  substantially  the  same  ground  that  had  been 
taken  by  his  master,  Joseph  Warton,  fifty  years  before. 
He  asserted  in  brief  that,  as  compared  with  Spenser, 
Shakspere,  and  Milton,  Pope  was  a  poet  of  the  second 
order;  that  in  his  descriptions  of  nature  he  was  inferior 
to  Thomson  and  Cowper,  and  in  lyrical  poetry  to  Dryden 
and  Gray;  and  that,  except  in  his  "Eloisa"  and  one  or 
two  other  pieces,  he  was  the  poet  of  artificial  manners 
and  of  didactic  maxims,  rather  than  of  passions.  Bowies' 
chief  addition  to  Warton's  criticism  was  the  following 
paragraph,  upon  which  the  controversy  that  ensued  chiefly 
hinged:  "All  images  drawn  from  what  is  beautiful  or 
sublime  in  the  works  of  nature  are  more  beautiful  and 
sublime  than  any  images  drawn  from  art,  and  they  are 
therefore  per  se  (abstractedly)  more  poetical.  In  like 
manner  those  passions  of  the  human  heart,  which  belong 
to  nature  in  general,  are  per  se  more  adapted  to  the  higher 
species  of  poetry  than  those  derived  from  incidental  and 
transient  manners." 

The  admirers  of  Pope  were  not  slow  in  joining  issue 
with  his  critic,  not  only  upon  his  general  estimate  of  the 
poet,  but  upon  the  principle  here  laid  down.  Thomas 
Campbell,  in  his  "  Specimens  of  the  British  Poets  "  ( 18 19), 
defended  Pope  both  as  a  man  and  a  poet,  and  maintained 
that  "exquisite  descriptions  of  artificial  objects  are  not 
less  characteristic  of  genius  than  the  description  of  sim- 
ple physical  appearances."  He  instanced  Milton's  de- 
scription of  Satan's  spear  and  shield,  and  gave  an  ani- 
mated picture  of  the  launching  of  a  ship  of  the  line  as 
an  example  of  the  "  sublime  objects  of  artificial  life." 
Bowles  replied  in  a  letter  to  Campbell  on  "  The  Invari- 


Coleridge,  ^Bowles,  and  the  "Pope  Controversy.     65 

able  Principles  of  Poetry."  He  claimed  that  it  was  the 
appearances  of  nature,  the  sea  and  the  sky,  that  lent  sub- 
limity to  the  launch  of  the  ship,  and  asked :  "  If  images 
derived  from  art  are  as  beautiful  and  sublime  as  those 
derived  from  nature,  why  was  it  necessary  to  bring  your 
ship  off  the  stocks?"  He  appealed  to  his  adversary 
whether  the  description  of  a  game  of  ombre  was  as  poet- 
ical as  that  of  a  walk  in  the  forest,  and  whether  "  the  sylph 
of  Pope,  *  trembling  over  the  fumes  of  a  chocolate  pot,' 
be  an  image  as  poetical  as  that  of  delicate  and  quaint 
Ariel,  who  sings  *  Where  the  bee  sucks,  there  lurk  (sic) 
I.' "  Campbell  replied  in  the  New  Monthly  Magazine, 
of  which  he  was  editor,  and  this  drew  out  another  rejoin- 
der from  Bowles.  Meanwhile  Byron  had  also  attacked 
Bowles  in  two  letters  to  Murray  (182 1),  to  which  the  in- 
defatigable pamphleteer  made  elaborate  replies.  The 
elder  Disraeli,  Gifford,  Octavius  Gilchrist,  and  one  Mar- 
tin M'Dermot  also  took  a  hand  in  the  fight — all  against 
Bowles — and  William  Roscoe,  the  author  of  the  "  Life  of 
Lorenzo  de  Medici,  "  attacked  him  in  an  edition  of  Pope 
which  he  brought  out  in  1824.  The  rash  detractor  of  the 
little  Twitnam  nightingale  soon  found  himself  engaged 
single-handed  against  a  host;  but  he  was  equal  to  the 
occasion,  in  volubility  if  not  in  logic,  and  poured  out  a 
series  of  pamphlets,  covering  in  all  some  thousand  pages, 
and  concluding  with  "A  Final  Appeal  to  the  Literary 
Public  "  (1825),  followed  by  "  more  last  words  of  Baxter," 
in  the  shape  of  "Lessons  in  Criticism  to  William  Ros- 
coe" (1825). 

The  opponents  of  Bowles  maintained,  in  general,  that 
in  poetry  the  subject  is  nothing,  but  the  execution  is  all ; 
that  one  class  of  poetry  has,  as  such,  no  superiority  over 


66  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

another;  and  that  poets  are  to  be  ranked  by  their  excel- 
lence as  artists,  and  not  according  to  some  imaginary 
scale  of  dignity  in  the  different  orders  of  poetry,  as  epic, 
didactic,  satiric,  etc.  "  There  is,  in  fact,"  wrote  Roscoe, 
"no  poetry  in  any  subject  except  what  is  called  forth  by 
the  genius  of  the  poet.  .  .  .  There  are  no  great  subjects 
but  such  as  are  made  so  by  the  genius  of  the  artist." 
Byron  said  that  to  the  question  "  whether  *  the  description 
of  a  game  of  cards  be  as  poetical,  supposing  the  execution 
of  the  artists  equal,  as  a  description  of  a  walk  in  a  forest/ 
it  may  be  answered  that  the  materials  are  certainly  not 
equal,  but  that  the  artist  who  has  rendered  the  game  of 
cards  poetical  is  by  far  the  greater  of  the  two.  But  all 
this  '  ordering '  of  poets  is  purely  arbitrary  on  the  part  of 
Mr.  Bowles.  There  may  or  may  not  be,  in  fact,  different 
*  orders '  of  poetry,  but  the  poet  is  always  ranked  accord- 
ing to  his  execution,  and  not  according  to  hrs^branch  of 
the  art."  Byron  also  contended,  like  Camr/beTl,  that  art 
is  just  as  poetical  as  nature,  and  that  it  was  not  the  water 
that  gave  interest  to  the  ship  but  the  ship  to  the  water. 
"What  was  it  attracted  the  thousands  to  the  launch? 
They  might  have  seen  the  poetical.  *  calm  water'  at  Wap- 
ping  or  in  the  London  lock  or  in  the  Paddington  Canal 
or  in  a  horse-pond  or  in  a  slop-basin."  Without  natural 
accessories — the  sun,  the  sky,  the  sea,  the  wind — Bowles 
had  said,  the  ship's  properties  are  only  blue  bunting,  coarse 
canvas,  and  tall  poles.  "So  they  are,"  admits  Byron, 
"and  porcelain  is  clay,  and  man  is  dust,  and  flesh  is 
grass;  and  yet  the  two  latter  at  least  are  the  subjects  of 
much  poesy.  .  .  .  Ask  the  traveller  what  strikes  him  as 
most  poetical,  the  Parthenon  or  the  rock  on  which  it 
stands.  .  .  .  Take  away  Stonehenge  from  Salisbury  plain 


Coleridge,  Howies,  and  the  "Pope  Controversy.     67 

and  it  is  nothing  more  than  Hounslow  Heath  or  any  other 
unenclosed  down.  .  .  .  There  can  be  nothing  more  poet- 
ical in  its  aspect  than  the  city  of  Venice;  does  this  de- 
pend upon  the  sea  or  the  canals?  ...  Is  it  the  Canal 
Grande  or  the  Rialto  which  arches  it,  the  churches  which 
tower  over  it,  the  palaces  which  line  and  the  gondolas 
which  glide  over  the  waters,  that  render  this  city  more 
poetical  than  Rome  itself?  .  .  .  Without  these  the  water 
would  be  nothing  but  a  clay-coloured  ditch.  .  .  .  There 
would  be  nothing  to  make  the  canal  of  Venice  more  poet- 
ical than  that  of  Paddington." 

There  was  something  futile  about  this  whole  discus- 
sion. It  was  marked  with  that  fatally  superficial  and 
mechanical  character  which  distinguished  all  literary 
criticism  in  Europe  before  the  time  of  Lessing  in  Ger- 
many, and  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  in  England.  In 
particular,  the  cardinal  point  on  which  Pope's  rank  as  a 
poet  was  made  to  turn  was  really  beside  the  question. 
There  is  no  such  essential  distinction  as  was  attempted 
to  be  drawn  between  "natural  objects"  and  "objects  of 
artificial  life,"  as  material  for  poetry.  In  a  higher  syn- 
thesis, man  and  all  his  works  are  but  a  part  of  nature, 
as  Shakspere  discerned : 

11  Nature  is  made  better  by  no  mean 
But  nature  makes  that  mean  :  so  over  that  art 
Which  you  say  adds  to  nature,  is  an  art 
That  nature  made  :  the  art  itself  is  nature. " 

Shakspere,  as  well  as  Pope,  dealt  with  artificial  life, 
i.e.,  with  the  life  of  man  in  society,  but  how  differently ! 
The  reason  why  Pope's  poetry  fails  to  satisfy  the  heart 
and  the  imagination  resides  not  in  his  subjects — so  far 
Campbell  and  Byron  were  right — but  in  his  mood ;  in  his 


68  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

imperfect  sense  of  beauty  and  his  deficiency  in  the  high- 
est qualities  of  the  poet's  soul.  I  may  illustrate  this  by 
an  arrow  from  Byron's  own  quiver.  To  prove  how  much 
poetry  may  be  associated  with  "a  simple,  household, 
•  indoor,'  artificial,  and  ordinary  image,"  he  cites  the 
famous  stanza  in  Cowper's  poem  to  Mrs.  Unwin : 

"Thy  needles,  once  a  shining  store, 
For  my  sake  restless  heretofore, 
Now  rust  disused  and  shine  no  more, 
My  Mary." 

Let  us  contrast  with  this  a  characteristic  passage  from 

"  The  Rape  of  the  Lock,"  which  also  contains  an  artificial 

image: 

"  On  her  white  breast  a  sparkling  cross  she  wore 
Which  Jews  might  kiss  and  infidels  adore." 

What  is  the  difference  ?  It  is  in  the  feeling  of  the  poet. 
Pope's  couplet  is  very  charming,  but  it  is  merely  gal- 
lantry, a  neatly  turned  compliment,  playful,  only  half 
sincere,  a  spice  of  mockery  lurking  under  the  sugared 
words;  while  in  Cowper's  lines  the  humble  domestic  im- 
plement is  made  sacred  by  the  emotions  of  pity,  sorrow, 
gratitude,  and  affection  with  which  it  is  associated.  The 
reason  why  Pope  is  not  a  high  poet — or  perhaps  a  poet  at 
all  in  the  best  sense  of  the  word — is  indicated  by  Cole- 
ridge with  his  usual  acuteness  and  profundity  in  a  sen- 
tence already  quoted ;  that  Pope's  poetry  both  in  matter 
and  diction  was  "  characterised  not  so  much  by  poetic 
thoughts,  as  by  thoughts  translated  into  the  language  of 
poetry." 

Bowles,  on  the  whole,  had  hold  of  the  right  end  of  the 
controversy;  his  instinct  was  correct,  but  he  was  a 
wretched  controversialist.     As  a  poet  in  the  minor  key, 


Coleridge,  Howies,  and  the  ''Pope  Controversy.     69 

he  was  tolerable;  but  as  a  prose  writer,  he  was  a  very 
dull  person  and  a  bore.  He  was  rude  and  clumsy;  he 
tried  to  be  sarcastic  and  couldn't;  he  had  damnable  iter- 
ation. Lowell  speaks  of  his  "  peculiarly  helpless  way," 
and  says :  "  Bowles,  in  losing  his  temper,  lost  also  what 
little  logic  he  had,  and  though,  in  a  vague  way,  aestheti- 
cally right,  contrived  always  to  be  argumentatively  wrong. 
Anger  made  worse  confusion  in  a  brain  never  very  clear, 
and  he  had  neither  the  scholarship  nor  the  critical  faculty 
for  a  vigorous  exposition  of  his  own  thesis.  Never  was 
wilder  hitting  than  his,  and  he  laid  himself  open  to  dread- 
ful punishment,  especially  from  Byron,  whose  two  letters 
are  masterpieces  of  polemic  prose."  Indeed,  the  most 
interesting  feature  of  the  Pope  controversy  is  Byron's  part 
in  it  and  the  light  which  it  sheds  on  his  position  in  rela- 
tion to  the  classic  and  romantic  schools.  Before  the  defi 
nite  outbreak  of  the  controversy,  Byron  had  attacked 
Bowles  for  his  depreciation  of  Pope,  in  "  English  Bards 
and  Scotch  Reviewers  "  (1809),  in  a  passage  in  which  he 
wished  that  Bowles  had  lived  in  Pope's  time,  so  that 
Pope  might  have  put  him  into  the  "  Dunciad." 

It  seems  at  first  sight  hard  to  reconcile  Byron's  evi- 
dently sincere  admiration  for  Pope  with  the  ultra-roman- 
tic cast  of  his  own  poetry — romantic,  as  Pater  says, 
in  mood  if  not  in  subject.  In  his  early  fondness  for 
Ossian,  his  intense  passion,  his  morbid  gloom,  his  ex- 
altation in  wild  and  solitary  places,  his  love  of  night  and 
storm,  of  the  desert  and  the  ocean,  in  the  careless  and 
irregular  outpour  of  his  verse,  in  his  subjectivity,  the 
continual  presence  of  the  man  in  the  work — in  all  these 
particulars  Byron  was  romantic  and  would  seem  to  have 
had  little  in  common  with  Pope.     But  there  was  another 


70  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

side  to  Byron — and  William  Rossetti  thinks  his  most 
characteristic  side — viz.,  his  wit  and  understanding;  and 
this  side  sympathised  heartily  with  Pope.  It  is  well 
known  that  when  Byron  came  back  from  the  East  he  had 
in  his  trunk  besides  the  manuscript  of  "  Childe  Harold," 
which  he  thought  little  of,  certain  "  Hints  from  Horace  " 
which  the  world  thinks  less  of,  but  which  he  was  eager  to 
have  published,  while  Dallas  was  urging  him  to  print 
"Childe  Harold."  "English  Bards  and  Scotch  Re- 
viewers" is  a  thoroughly  Popeian  satire;  and  "The 
Vision  of  Judgment,"  though  not  in  couplets  but  in  ottava 
rima,  is  one  of  the  best  personal  satires  in  English.  It 
has  all  of  Pope's  malicious  wit,  with  a  sweep  and  glow, 
which  belonged  to  Byron  as  a  poet  rather  than  as  a  satirist, 
and  which  Pope  never  had.  Lowell  thinks,  too,  that  what 
Byron  admired  in  Pope  was  "that  patience  in  careful  fin- 
ish which  he  felt  to  be  wanting  in  himself  and  in  most 
of  his  contemporaries." 

With  all  this  there  probably  mingled  something  of 
perversity  and  exaggeration  in  Byron's  praises  of  Pope. 
He  hated  the  Lakers,  and  he  delighted  to  use  Pope 
against  them  as  a  foil  and  a  rod.  He  at  least  was  every- 
thing that  they  were  not.  Doubtless  in  the  Pope  contro- 
versy, his  "  object  was  mainly  mischief,"  as  Lowell  says. 
Byron  loved  a  fight;  he  thought  the  Rev.  W.  L.  Bowles 
an  ass,  and  he  determined  to  have  some  fun  with  him. 
Besides  the  two  letters  to  Murray  in  1821,  an  open  letter 
of  Byron's  to  Isaac  Disraeli,  dated  March  15,  1820,  and 
entitled  "  Some  Observations  upon  an  article  in  Black- 
wood's Magazine"  *  contains  a  long  passage  in  vindica- 
tion of  Pope  and  in  denunciation  of  contemporary  poetry 
*  No.  xxix.,  August,  1819,  "Remarks  on  Don  Juan." 


Coleridge,  "Bowles,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     7 1 

— a  passage  which  is  important  not  only  as  showing 
Byron's  opinions,  but  as  testifying  to  the  very  general 
change  in  taste  which  had  taken  place  since  1756,  when 
Joseph  Warton  was  so  discouraged  by  the  public  hostility 
to  his  "Essay  on  Pope"  that  he  withheld  the  second  vol- 
ume for  twenty-six  years.  "  The  great  cause  of  the  pres- 
ent deplorable  state  of  English  poetry,"  writes  Byron,  "  is 
to  be  attributed  to  that  absurd  and  systematic  deprecia- 
tion of  Pope  in  which,  for  the  last  few  years,  there  has 
been  a  kind  of  epidemical  concurrence.  Men  of  the  most 
opposite  opinions  have  united  upon  this  topic."  He  then 
goes  on  to  praise  Pope  and  abuse  his  own  contemporaries, 
especially  the  Lake  poets,  both  in  the  most  extravagant 
terms.  Pope  he  pronounces  the  most  perfect  and  harmo- 
nious of  poets.  "  Southey,  Wordsworth,  and  Coleridge," 
he  says,  "  had  all  of  them  a  very  natural  antipathy  to 
Pope  .  .  .  but  they  have  been  joined  in  it  by  .  .  .  the 
whole  heterogeneous  mass  of  living  English  poets  except- 
ing Crabbe,  Rogers,  Gifford,  and  Campbell,  who,  both 
by  precept  and  practice,  have  proved  their  adherence ;  and 
by  me,  who  have  shamefully  deviated  in  practice,  but  have 
ever  loved  and  honoured  Pope's  poetry  with  my  whole 
soul."  There  is  ten  times  more  poetry,  he  thinks,  in  the 
"  Essay  on  Man  "  than  in  the  "  Excursion  " ;  and  if  you 
want  passion,  where  is  to  be  found  stronger  than  in  the 
"Epistle  of  Eloisa  to  Abelard"?  To  the  sneer  that 
Pope  is  only  the  "  poet  of  reason  "  Byron  replies  that  he 
will  undertake  to  find  more  lines  teeming  with  imagina- 
tion in  Pope  than  in  any  two  living  poets.  "  In  the  mean 
time,"  he  asks,  "what  have  we  got  instead?  .  .  .  The 
Lake  school,"  and  "a  deluge  of  flimsy  and  unintelligible 
romances  imitated  from  Scott  and  myself."     He  proph- 


72  tA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

esies  that  all  except  the  classical  poets,  Crabbe,  Rogers, 
and  Campbell,  will  survive  their  reputation,  acknowl- 
edges that  his  own  practice  as  a  poet  is  not  in  harmony 
with  his  principles,  and  says:  "I  told  Moore  not  very 
long  ago,  '  We  are  all  wrong  except  Rogers,  Crabbe,  and 
Campbell.'"  In  the  first  of  his  two  letters  to  Murray, 
Byron  had  taken  himself  to  task  in  much  the  same  way. 
He  compared  the  romanticists  to  barbarians  who  had 
"  raised  a  mosque  by  the  side  of  a  Grecian  temple  of  the 
purest  architecture  " ;  and  who  were  "  not  contented  with 
their  own  grotesque  edifice  unless  they  destroy  the  prior 
and  purely  beautiful  fabric  which  preceded,  and  which 
shames  them  and  theirs  for  ever  and  ever.  I  shall  be 
told  that  amongst  those  I  have  been  (or  it  may  be  still 
am)  conspicuous — true,  and  I  am  ashamed  of  it.  I  have 
been  amongst  the  builders  of  this  Babel  .  .  .  but  never 
among  the  envious  destroyers  of  the  classic  temple  of 
our  predecessor."  "Neither  time  nor  distance  nor  grief 
nor  age  can  ever  diminish  my  veneration  for  him  who  is 
the  great  moral  poet  of  all  times,  of  all  climes,  of  all 
feelings,  and  of  all  stages  of  existence.  The  delight  of 
my  boyhood,  the  study  of  my  manhood,  perhaps  he  may 
ba  the  consolation  of  my  age.  His  poetry  is  the  Book 
of  Life."  * 

*  "Time  was,  ere  yet  in  these  degenerate  days 
Ignoble  themes  obtained  mistaken  praise. 
When  sense  and  wit  with  poesy  allied, 
No  fabled  graces,  flourished  side  by  side.  .  .  . 
Then,  in  this  happy  isle,  a  Pope's  pure  strain 
Sought  the  rapt  soul  to  charm,  nor  sought  in  vain  ; 
A  polished  nation's  praise  aspired  to  claim, 
And  raised  the  people's,  as  the  poet's  fame.  .  .  . 
[But]  Milton,  Dryden.  Pope,  alike  forgot, 
Resign  their  hallowed  bays  to  Walter  Scott." 

— "English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers.* 


Coleridge,  TSowles,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     73 

Strange  language  this  from  the  author  of  "Childe 
Harold  "  and  "  The  Corsair  n !  But  the  very  extravagance 
of  Byron's  claims  for  Pope  makes  it  plain  that  he  was 
pleading  a  lost  cause.  When  Warton  issued  the  first  vol- 
ume of  his  "  Essay  on  Pope,"  it  was  easy  for  leaders  of 
literary  opinion,  like  Johnson  and  Goldsmith,  to  pooh- 
pooh  the  critical  canons  of  the  new  school.  But  when 
Byron  wrote,  the  aesthetic  revolution  was  already  accom- 
plished. The  future  belonged  not  to  Campbell  and  Gif- 
ford  and  Rogers  and  Crabbe,  but  to  Wordsworth  and 
Scott  and  Coleridge  and  Shelley  and  Keats;  to  Byron 
himself,  the  romantic  poet,  but  not  to  Byron  the  laudator 
temporis  acti.  The  victory  remained  with  Bowles,  not 
because  he  had  won  it  by  argument,  but  because  opinion 
had  changed,  and  changed  probably  once  and  for  all.* 

*For  the  benefit  of  any  reader  who  may  wish  to  follow  up 
the  steps  of  the  Pope  controversy,  I  give  the  titles  of  Bowles' 
successive  pamphlets.  "  The  Invariable  Principles  of  Poetry  : 
A  Letter  to  Thomas  Campbell,  Esq.,"  1819.  "A  Reply  to  an 
'Unsentimental  Sort  of  Critic,'"  Bath,  1820.  [This  was  in 
answer  to  a  review  of  "Spence's  Anecdotes"  in  the  Quarter- 
ly  for  October,  1820.]  "A  Vindication  of  the  Late  Editor  of 
Pope's  Works,"  London,  1821,  second  edition.  [This  was 
also  a  reply  to  the  Qttarterly  reviewer  and  to  Gilchrist's 
letters  in  the  London  Magazine,  and  was  first  printed  in 
vol.  xvii.,  Nos.  33,  34,  and  35  of  the  Pamphleteer.}  '"An 
Answer  to  Some  Observations  of  Thomas  Campbell,  Esq.,  in 
his  Specimens  of  British  Poets"  (1822).  **?An  Address  to 
Thomas  Campbell,  Esq.,  Editor  of  the  New  Monthly  Mag  a- 
zine,  in  Consequence  of  an  Article  in  that  Publication  "  (1822) . 
P  Letters  to  Lord  Byron  on  a  Question  of  Poetical  Criticism, " 
London,  1822.  "A  Final  Appeal  to  the  Literary  Public  Rel- 
ative to  Pope,  in  Reply  to  Certain  Observations  of  Mr.  Ros- 
coe,"  London,  1825.  "Lessons  in  Criticism  to  William  Ros- 
coe,  Esq.,  with  Further  Lessons  in  Criticism  to  a  Quarterly 
Reviewer,"  London,  1826.  Gilchrist's  three  letters  to  Bowles 
were  published  in  1820-21.  M'Dermot's  "Letter  to  the  Rev. 
W.  L.  Bowles  in  Reply  to  His  Letter  to  Thomas  Campbell, 
Esq.,  and  to  His  Two  Letters  to  Lord  Byron,"  was  printed  at 
London,  in  1822. 


74  <Sl  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

Coleridge's  four  contributions  to  the  "  Lyrical  Ballads  " 
included  his  masterpiece,  "  The  Ancient  Mariner."  This 
is  the  high-water  mark  of  romantic  poetry;  and,  familiar 
as  it  is,  cannot  be  dismissed  here  without  full  examina- 
tion. As  to  form,  it  is  a  long  narrative  ballad  in  seven 
"  fyts  "  or  parts,  and  descends  from  that  "  Bible  of  the 
romantic  reformation,"  Bishop  Percy's  "  Reliques."  The 
verse  is  the  common  ballad  stanza — eights  and  sixes — 
enriched  by  a  generous  use  of  medial  rhyme  and  alliter- 
tion  : 

"The  fair  breeze  blew,  the  white  foam  flew, 
The  furrow  followed  free  : 
We  were  the  first  that  ever  burst 
Into  that  silent  sea  "  ; 

varied  and  prolonged,  moreover,  by  the  introduction  of 
additional  lines  with  alternate  riming,  with  couplets 
and  sometimes  with  triplets.  There  are  many  five-lined 
and  six-lined  stanzas,  and  one — the  longest  in  the  poem 
— of  nine  lines.  But  these  metric  variations  are  used 
with  temperance.  The  stanza  form  is  never  complex;  it 
is  built  up  naturally  from  the  ballad  stanza  upon  which 
it  rests  and  to  which  it  constantly  returns  as  its  norm  and 
type.  Of  the  one  hundred  and  forty-two  stanzas  in  the 
poem,  one  hundred  and  six  are  the  ordinary  four-lined 
stanzas  of  popular  poetry.  The  language,  too,  is  not 
obtrusively  archaic  as  it  is  in  Chatterton  and  some 
of  the  Spenserians;  at  most  an  occasional  "wist" 
or  "eftsoons";  now  and  then  a  light  accent,  in  ballad 
fashion,  on  the  final  syllable  of  a  rime-word  like  mar- 
iner or  countrie.  There  is  no  definite  burden,  which 
would  have  been  out  of  place  in  a  poem  that  is  narrative 
and  not  lyrical ;    but  the  ballad  habits  of  phrase  repeti- 


Coleridge,  Tlowles,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     75 

tion  and  question  and  answer  are  sparingly  employed.*  I  In 
reproducing  the  homely  diction  of  old  popular  minstrelsy, 
Coleridge's  art  was  nicer  than  Scott's  and  more  perfect 
at  every  point.  J  How  skilfully  studied,  e.g.,  is  the  sim- 
plicity of  the  following: 

"The  moving  moon  went  up  the  sky 
And  nowhere  did  abide : 
Softly  she  was  going  up. " 

"  Day  after  day,  day  after  day 
We  stuck. " 

"The  naive  artlessness  of  the  Middle  Ages,"  says 
Brandi,  "  became  in  the  hands  of  the  Romantic  school, 
an  intentional  form  of  art/'  The  impression  of  antiquity 
is  heightened  by  the  marginal  gloss  which  the  poet  added 
in  later  editions,  composed  in  a  prose  that  has  a  quaint 
beauty  of  its  own,  in  its  mention  of  "  the  creatures  of  the 
calm  " ;  its  citation  of  "  the  learned  Jew  Josephus  and  the 
Platonic  Constantinopilitan,  Michael  Psellus,"  as  au- 
thorities on  invisible  spirits;  and  in  passages  like  that 
Dantesque  one  which  tells  how  the  mariner  "in  his  lone- 
liness and  fixedness  yearneth  towards  the  journeying 
moon,  and  the  stars  that  still  sojourn,  yet, still  move  on- 
wards; and  everywhere  the  blue  sky  belongs  to  them,  and 

*  "  With  throats  unslaked,  with  black  lips  baked, 
We  could  not  laugh  nor  waiL"  etc. 

"With  throats  unslaked,  with  black  lips  baked, 
Agape  they  heard  me  call,"  etc. 

"Are  those  her  sails  that  glance  in  the  sun 
Like  restless  gossamers? 
Are  those  her  ribs, "  etc. 

Cf.  "  Christabel  "  : 

"Is  the  night  chilly  and  dark? 
The  night  is  chilly,  but  not  dark." 

And  see  vol.  i.,  p.  271. 


j  6  <iA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

is  their  appointed  rest,  and  their  native  country,  and 
their  own  natural  homes,  which  they  enter  unannounced, 
as  lords  that  are  certainly  expected,  and  yet  there  is  a 
silent  joy  at  their  arrival." 

In  "  The  Ancient  Mariner "  there  are  present  in  the 
highest  degree  the  mystery,  indefiniteness,  and  strange- 
ness which  are  the  marks  of  romantic  art.  The  period 
is  not  strictly  mediaeval,  for  mariners  in  the  Middle  Ages 
did  not  sail  to  the  south  polar  regions  or  lie  becalmed 
in  the  equatorial  seas.  But  the  whole  atmosphere  of  the 
poem  is  mediaeval.  The  Catholic  idea  of  penance  or  ex- 
piation is  the  moral  theme  enwrought  with  the  story.  The 
hermit  who  shrives  the  mariner,  and  the  little  vesper  bell 
which  biddeth  him  to  prayer  are  Catholic  touches,  and  so 
are  the  numerous  pious  oaths  and  ejaculations: 

"  By  him  who  died  on  cross  "  : 

"Heaven's  mother  send  us  grace  "  : 

"The  very  deep  did  rot.     O  Christ 
That  ever  this  should  be  !  " 

The  albatross  is  hung  about  the  mariner's  neck  instead 
of  the  crucifix,  and  drops  off  only  when  he  blesses  the 
creatures  of  the  calm  and  is  able  to  pray.  The  sleep 
which  refreshes  him  is  sent  by  "  Mary  Queen "  from 
heaven.  The  cross-bow  with  which  he  shoots  the  bird  is 
a  mediaeval  property.  The  loud  bassoon  and  the  bride's 
garden  bower  and  the  procession  of  merry  minstrels  who 
go  nodding  their  heads  before  her  are  straight  out  of  the 
old  land  of  balladry.  One  cannot  fancy  the  wedding 
guest  dressed  otherwise  than  in  doublet  and  hose,  and 
perhaps  wearing  those  marvellous  pointed  shoes  and 
hanging  sleeves  which  are  shown  in  miniature  paintings 
of  the  fifteenth  century.     And  it  is  thus  that  illustrators 


Coleridge,  Howies,  and  the  'Pope  Controversy.     77 

of  the  poem  have  depicted  him.  Place  is  equally  indefi- 
nite with  time.  What  port  the  ill-fated  ship  cleared  from 
we  do  not  know  or  seek  to  know ;  only  the  use  of  the 
word  kirk  implies  that  it  was  somewhere  in  "the  north 
countree  " — the  proper  home  of  ballad  poetry. 

^Coleridge's  romances  were  very  differently  conceived 
from  Scott's.  He  wqve  them  out  of  "such  stuff  as 
dreams  are  made  on.")  Industrious  commentators  have 
indeed  traced  features  of  "The  Ancient  Mariner"  to 
various  sources.  Coleridge's  friend,  Mr.  Cruikshank. 
had  a  dream  of  a  skeleton  ship.  Wordsworth  told  him 
the  incident,  which  he  read  in  Shelvocke's  voyages,  of  a 
certain  Captain  Simon  Hatley  who  shot  a  black  albatross 
south  of  Terra  del  Fuego,  in  hopes  that  its  death  might 
bring  fair  weather.  Brandl  thinks  that  the  wedding  ban- 
quet in  Monk  Lewis'  "  Alonzo  the  Brave  and  the  Fair 
Imogene,"  furnished  a  hint;  and  surmises — what  seems 
unlikely — that  Coleridge  had  read  a  certain  epistle  by 
Paulinus,  a  bishop  of  the  fourth  century,  describing  a 
vessel  which  came  ashore  on  the  coast  of  Lucania  wij:h 
only  one  sailor  on  board,  who  reported  that  the  ship  had 
been  deserted,  as  a  wreck,  by  the  rest  of  the  crew,  and 
had  since  been  navigated  by  spirits. 

But  all  this  is  nothing  and  less  than  nothing.  "  The 
Ancient  Mariner  "  is  the  baseless  fabric  of  a  vision.  We 
are  put  under  a  spell,  like  the  wedding  guest,  and  carried 
off  to  the  isolation  and  remoteness  of  m id-ocean.  Through 
the  chinks  of  the  narrative,  the  wedding  music  sounds 
unreal  and  far  off.  What  may  not  happen  to  a  man  alone 
on  a  wide,  wide  sea?  The  line  between  earthly  and  un- 
earthly vanishes.  Did  the  mariner  really  see  the  spec- 
tral bark  and  hear  spirits  talking,  or  was  it  all  but  the 


78  *A  History  of  English  "Romanticism. 

phantasmagoria  of  the  calenture,  the  fever  which  attacks 
the  sailor  on  the  tropic  main,  so  that  he  seems  to  see 
green  meadows  and  water  brooks  on  the  level  brine  ?  No 
one  can  tell;  for  he  is  himself  the  only  witness,  and  the 
ship  is  sunk  at  the  harbour  mouth.  One  conjectures  that 
no  wreckers  or  divers  will  ever  bring  it  to  the  top  again. 
Nay,  was  not  the  mariner,  too,  a  spectre?  Now  he  is 
gone,  and  what  was  all  this  that  he  told  me,  thinks  the 
wedding  guest,  as  he  rises  on  the  morrow  morn.  Or  did 
he  tell  me,  or  did  I  only  dream  it?  A  light  shadow  cast 
by  some  invisible  thing  swiftly  traverses  the  sunny  face 
of  nature  and,  is  gone.  Did  we  see  it,  or  imagine  it? 
Even  so  elusive,  so  uncertain,  so  shadowy  and  phantom- 
like is  the  spiriting  of  this  wonderful  poem.  "Poetry," 
says  Coleridge,  "gives  most  pleasure  when  only  gener- 
ally and  not  perfectly  understood.  It  was  so  by  me  with 
Gray's  *  Bard  '  and  Collins'  odes.  'The  Bard'  once  in- 
toxicated me,  and  now  I  read  it  without  pleasure."* 
There  is  no  danger  that  his  own  poem  will  ever  lose  its 
attractiveness  in  this  way.  Something  inexplicable  will 
remain  to  tease  us,  like  the  white  Pater  Noster  and  St. 
Peter's  sister  in  Chaucer's  night-spell.f 

*"Anima  Poetse,"  1895,  p.  5.  This  recent  collection  of 
marginalia  has  an  equal  interest  with  Coleridge's  well-known 
"Table  Talk."  It  is  the  English  equivalent  of  Hawthorne's 
"American  Note  Books, "full  of  analogies,  images,  and  re- 
flections— topics  and  suggestions  for  possible  development 
in  future  romances  and  poems.  In  particular  it  shows  an 
abiding  prepossession  with  the  psychology  of  dreams,  appa- 
ritions, and  mental  illusions  of  all  sorts. 

f  "  Jesu  Crist  and  Seint  Benedight 

Blisse  this  hous  from  every  wicked  wight, 
Fro  the  nightes  mare,  the  white  Pater  Noster ; 
Where  wonest  thou,  Seint  Peter's  suster." 

—"The  Miller's  Tale." 


Coleridge,  TBowles,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     79 

Pater  subtly  connects  Coleridge's  poetic  method  with 
his  philosophical  idealism.  "  The  too  palpable  intruders 
from  a  spiritual  world,  in  almost  all  ghost  literature,  in 
Scott  and  Shakespeare  even,  have  a  kind  of  coarseness 
or  crudeness.  .  .  .  '  The  Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner ' 
has  the  plausibility,  the  perfect  adaptatiojato  reason  and 
life,  which  belongs  to  the  marvellous,  when  actually  pre- 
sented as  part  of  a  credible"  experience  in  our  dreams. 
.  .  .  The  spectral  object,  so  crude,  so,  impossible,  has 
become  plausible,  as  vthe  spot  upon  the  brain  that  will 
show  itself  without/  and  is  understood  to  be  but  a  condi- 
tion of  one's  own  mind,  for  which — according  to  the  scep- 
ticism latent  at  least  in  so  much  of  our  modern  philos- 
ophy— the  so-called  real  things  themselves  are  but  spectra 
after  all.  It  is  this  finer,  more  delicately  marvellous 
supernaturalism,  the  fruit  of  his  more  delicate  psychol- 
ogy, which  Coleridge  infuses  into  romantic  narrative,  itself 
also  then  a  new  or  revived  thing  in  English  literature; 
and  with  a  fineness  of  weird  effect  in  *  The  Ancient  Mar- 
iner '  unknown  in  those  old,  more  simple,  romantic  legends 
and  ballads.  -It  is  a  flower  of  mediaeval,  or  later  German 
romance,  growing  up  in  the  peculiarly  compounded  atmos- 
phere of  modern  psychological  speculation,  and  putting 
forth  in  it  wholly  new  qualities." 

In  "  The  Ancient  Mariner,"  as  in  most  purely  romantic 
poetry,  the  appeal  is  more  to  the  imagination  than  to  the 
heart  or  the  conscience.  Mrs.  Barbauld  complained  that 
it  was  improbable  and  had  no  moral.  Coleridge  ad- 
mitted its  improbability,  but  said  that  it  had  too  much 
moral ;  that,  artistically  speaking,  it  should  have  had  no 
more  moral  than  a  fairy  tale.  The  lesson  of  course  is 
that  of  kindness  to  animals — "  He  prayeth  well  who  lov- 


80  tA  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

eth  well,"  etc.  But  the  punishment  of  the  mariner,  and 
still  more  of  the  mariner's  messmates,  is  so  out  of  pro- 
portion to  the  gravity  of  the  offence  as  to  be  slightly 
ludicrous  when  stated  by  Leslie  Stephen  thus:  "People 
who  approve  of  the  unnecessary  killing  of  an  albatross 
will  die  a  lingering  death  by  starvation."  The  moral,  as 
might  be  guessed,  was  foisted  upon  the  poem  by  Words- 
worth, and  is  identical  with  that  of  "  Hart-Leap  Well." 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  started  to  write  "The  An- 
cient Mariner"  jointly;  and  two  or  three  lines  in  the 
poem,  as  it  stands,  were  contributed  by  Wordsworth.  But 
he  wanted  to  give  the  mariner  himself  "  character  and 
profession";  and  to  have  the  dead  seamen  come  to  life 
and  sail  the  ship  into  port;  and  in  other  ways  laid  so 
heavy  a  hand  upon  Coleridge's  airy  creation  that  it  be- 
came plain  that  a  partnership  on  these  terms  was  out  of 
the  question,  and  Wordsworth  withdrew  altogether.  If 
we  must  look  for  spiritual  sustenence  in  the  poem,  we 
shall  find  it  perhaps  not  so  much  in  any  definite  warning 
against  cruelty  to  creatures,  as  in  the  sentiment  of  the 
blessedness  of  human  companionship  and  the  omnipres- 
ence of  God's  mercy;  in  the  passage,  e.g.y 

"O  wedding  guest !  this  soul  hath  been 
Alone  on  a  wide,  wide  sea,"  etc. — 

where  the  thought  is  the  same  as  in  Cowper's  "  Soliloquy 
of  Alexander  Selkirk,"  even  to  the  detail  of  the  "  church- 
going  bell." 

The  first  part  of  "Christabel"  was  written  in  1797;* 
the  second  in  1800;  and  the  poem,  in  its  unfinished  state, 
was  given  to  the  press  in  18 16.  Meanwhile  it  had  be- 
come widely  known  in  manuscript.     Coleridge  used  to 


Coleridge,  'Bowles,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     8 1 

read  it  to  literary  circles,  and  copies  of  it  had  got  about. 
We  have  seen  its  influence  upon  Scott.  Byron  too  ad- 
mired it  greatly,  and  it  was  by  his  persuasion  that  Cole- 
ridge finally  published  it  as  a  fragment,  finding  himself 
unable  to  complete  it,  and  feeling  doubtless  that  the 
public  regarded  him  much  as  the  urchins  in  Keats'  poem 
regarded  the  crone 

"  Who  keepeth  close  a  wondrous  riddle  book, 
As  spectacled  she  sits  in  chimney  nook. " 

"  Christabel "  is  more  distinctly  mediaeval  than  "  The 
Ancient  Mariner,"  and  is  full  of  Gothic  elements:  a 
moated  castle,  with  its  tourney  court  and  its  great  gate 

.  .  .  "  ironed  within  and  without, 
Where  an  army  in  battle  array  had  marched  out  "  : 

a  feudal  baron  with  a  retinue  of  harpers,  heralds,  and 
pages;  a  lady  who  steals  out  at  midnight  into  the  moon- 
lit oak  wood,  to  pray  for  her  betrothed  knight;  a  sorceress 
who  pretends  to  have  been  carried  off  on  a  white  palfrey 
by  five  armed  men,  and  who  puts  a  spell  upon  the 
maiden. 

If  "The  Ancient  Mariner"  is  a  ballad,  " Christabel " 
is,  in  form,  a  roman  d'aventures,  or  metrical  chivalry  tale, 
written  in  variations  of  the  octosyllabic  couplet.  These 
variations,  Coleridge  said,  were  not  introduced  wantonly 
but  "  in  correspondence  with  some  transition,  in  the  na- 
ture of  the  imagery  or  passion."  A  single  passage  will 
illustrate  this: 

"They  passed  the  hall  that  echoes  still, 
Pass  as  lightly  as  you  will. 
The  brands  were  flat,  the  brands  were  dying 
Amid  their  own  white  ashes  lying ; 


82  z/1  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

But  when  the  lady  passed,  there  came 

A  tongue  of  light,  a  fit  of  flame  ; 

And  Christabel  saw  the  lady's  eye, 

And  nothing  else  saw  she  thereby, 

Save  the  boss  of  the  shield  of  Sir  Leoline  tall. 

Which  hung  in  a  murky  old  niche  in  the  wall. 

O  softly  tread,  said  Christabel, 

My  father  seldom  sleepeth  well." 

When,  after  the  hurrying  anapaests,  the  verse  returns  to 
the  strict  iambic  measure  in  the  last  couplet,  the  effect  is 
a  hush,  in  harmony  with  the  meaning  of  the  words.* 

"  Christabel  "  is  not  so  unique  and  perfect  a  thing  as 
"  The  Ancient  Mariner,"  but  it  has  the  same  haunting 
charm,  and  displays  the  same  subtle  art  in  the  use  of  the 
supernatural.  Coleridge  protested  that  it  "  pretended  to 
be  nothing  more  than  a  common  fairy  tale."  f  But  Lowell 
asserts  that  it  is  "  tantalising  in  the  suggestion  of  deeper 
meanings  than  were  ever  there."  There  is,  in  truth,  a 
hint  of  allegory,  like  that  which  baffles  and  fascinates  in 
Christina  Rossetti's  "  Goblin  Market " ;  a  hint  so  elusive 
that  the  comparison  often  made  between  Geraldine 
and  Spenser's  Duessa,  is  distressing  to  a  reader  of 
sensitive  nerves.  That  mystery  which  is  a  favourite 
weapon  in  the  romanticist  armoury  is  used  again  here 
with  consummate  skill.  What  was  it  that  Christabel 
saw  on  the  lady's  bosom  ?  We  are  left  to  conjecture.  It 
was  "  a  sight  to  dream  of,  not  to  tell,"  J  and  the  poet 
keeps  his  secret.  Lamb,  whose  taste  was  very  fine  in 
these  matters,  advised  Coleridge  never  to  finish  the  poem. 
Brandl  thinks  that  the  idea  was  taken  from  the  curtained 


*  Vide  supra,  p.  27. 
f  "Biographia  Literaria,"  chap.  xxiv. 

%  Keats  quotes  this  line  in  a  letter  about  Edmund  Kean. 
Forman's  ed.,  vol.  iii.,  p.  4. 


Coleridge,  'Bowles,  and  the  'Pope  Controversy.     S$ 

picture  in  the  "Mysteries  of  Udolpho  " ;  and  he  also  con- 
siders that  the  general  situation — the  castle,  the  forest, 
the  old  father  and  his  young  daughter,  and  the  strange 
lady — are  borrowed  from  Mrs.  Radcliffe's  "Romance 
of  the  Forest";  and  that  Burger's  "Lenore,"  Lewis' 
"Alonzo,"  and  some  of  the  Percy  ballads  contributed  a,* 
detail  here  and  there.  But  Quellenforschungen  of  this 
kind  are  very  unimportant.  It  is  more  important  to  note 
the  superior  art  with  which  the  poet  excites  curiosity  and 
suspends — not  simply,  like  Mrs.  Radcliffe,  postpones —  % 
the  gratification  of  it  to  the  end,  and  beyond  the  end,  of 
the  poem.  Was  Geraldine  really  a  witch,  or  did  she  only 
seem  so  to  Christabel?  The  angry  moan  of  the  mastiff 
bitch  and  the  tongue  of  flame  that  shot  up  as  the  lady 
passed — were  they  omens,  or  accidents  which  popular 
superstition  interprets  into  omens?  Was  the  malignant 
influence  which  Geraldine  exerted  over  the  maiden  super- 
natural possession,  or  the  fascination  of  terror  and  repug- 
nance? Did  she  really  utter  the  words  of  a  charm,  or 
did  her  sweet  bedfellow  dream  them  ?  And  once  more, 
what  was  that  upon  her  breast — "  that  bosom  old — that 
bosom  cold  "  ?  Was  it  a  wound,  or  the  mark  of  a  ser- 
pent, or  some  foul  and  hideous  disfigurement — or  was  it 
only  the  shadows  cast  by  the  swinging  lamp? 

That  isolation  and  remoteness,  that  preparation  of  the 
reader's  mind  for  the  reception  of  incredible  things,  which 
Coleridge  secured  in  "  The  Ancient  Mariner  "  by  cutting 
off  his  hero  from  all  human  life  amid  the  solitude  of  the 
tropic  sea,  he  here  secured — in  a  less  degree,  to  be  sure 
— by  the  lonely  midnight  in  Sir  Leoline's  castle.  Geral- 
dine and  her  victim  are  the  only  beings  awake  except 
the  hooting  owls.     There  is  dim  moonlight  in  the  wood, 


* 


84  zA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

dim  firelight  in  the  hall,  and  in  Christabel's  chamber 
"the  silver  lamp  burns  dead  and  dim." 

The  second  part  of  the  poem  was  less  successful,  partly 
for  the  reason,  as  the  reviewers  pointed  out,  that  it  un- 
dertakes the  hardest  of  tasks,  "  witchery  by  daylight." 
But  there  were  other  reasons.  Three  years  had  passed 
since  the  poem  was  begun.  Coleridge  had  been  to  Ger- 
many and  had  settled  at  Keswick.  The  poet  had  been 
lost  in  the  metaphysician,  and  he  took  up  his  interrupted 
task  without  inspiration,  putting  force  upon  himself.  The 
signs  of  effort  are  everywhere  visible,  and  it  is  painfully 
manifest  that  the  poet  cannot  recover  the  genial,  creative 
mood  in  which  he  had  set  out.  In  particular  it  is  ob- 
servable that,  while  there  is  no  mention  of  place  in  the 
first  part,  now  we  have  frequent  references  to  Windermere,  - 
Borrowdale,  Dungeon  Ghyll,  and  other  Lake  Country 
localities  familiar  enough  in  Wordsworth's  poetry,  but 
strangely  out  of  place  in  "  Christabel."  It  was  certainly 
an  artistic  mistake  to  transfer  Sir  Leoline's  castle  from 
fairyland  to  Cumberland.*  There  is  one  noble  passage 
in  the  second  part,  the  one  which  Byron  prefixed  to  his 
"  Farewell "  to  Lady  Byron : 

44  Alas  !  they  had  been  friends  in  youth,"  etc. 

But  the  stress  of  personal  emotion  in  these  lines  is  not 
in  harmony  with  the  romantic  context.  They  are  like  a 
patch  of  cloth  of  gold  let  into  a  lace  garment  and  strain- 
ing the  delicate  tissue  till  it  tears. 

The  example  of  "  The  Ancient  Mariner,"  and  in  a  still 
greater  degree  of  "  Christabel,"  was  potent  upon  all  sub- 
sequent romantic  poetry.     It  is  seen  in  Scott,  in  Byron, 

*  Vide  supra,  p.  14. 


Coleridge,  Howies,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     85 

and  in  Keats,  not  only  in  the  modelling  of  their  tales, 
but  in  single  lines  and  images.  In  the  first  stanza  of  the 
"Lay"  Scott  repeats  the  line  which  occurs  so  often  in 
"  Christabel  "— "  Jesu  Maria  shield  her  well!"  In  the 
same  poem,  the  passage  where  the  Lady  Margaret  steals 
out  of  Branksome  Tower  at  dawn  to  meet  her  lover  in  the 
wood,  gliding  down  the  secret  stair  and  passing  the 
bloodhound  at  the  portal,  will  remind  all  readers  of 
"  Christabel.7'  The  dialogue  between  the  river  and 
mountain  spirits  will  perhaps  remind  them  of  the  ghostly 
antiphonies  which  the  "Mariner"  hears  in  his  trance. 
The  couplet 


"The  seething  pitch  and  molten  lead 
Reeked  like  a  witch's  caldron  red." 

is,  of  course,  from  Coleridge's 


"The  water,  like  a  witch's  oils, 
Burned  green  and  blue  and  white.' 


In  "The  Lord  of  the  Isles"  Scott  describes  the  "elvish 
lustre  "  and  "  livid  flakes  "  of  the  phosphorescence  of  the 
sea,  and  cites,  in  a  note,  the  description,  in  "The  An- 
cient Mariner,"  of  the  sea  snakes  from  which 

"The  elvish  light 
Fell  off  in  hoary  flakes." 

The  most  direct  descendant  of  "  Christabel "  was  "  The 
Eve  of  St.  Agnes."  Madeline's  chamber,  "hushed, 
silken,  chaste,"  recalls  inevitably  the  passage  in  the 
older  poem : 

"  The  moon  shines  dim  in  the  open  air, 
And  not  a  moonbeam  enters  here. 
But  they  without  its  light  can  see 
The  chamber  carved  so  curiously, 


1 


i 


*  ■ 


86  <;A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Carved  with  figures  strange  and  sweet, 
All  made  out  of  the  carver's  brain, 
For  a  lady's  chamber  meet : 
The  lamp  with  twofold  silver  chain 
Is  fastened  to  an  angel's  feet." 

The  rest  of  Coleridge's  ballad  work  is  small  in  quan- 
tity and  may  be  dismissed  briefly.  "  Alice  du  Clos  "  has 
good  lines,  but  is  unimportant  as  a  whole.  The  very 
favourite  poem  "  Love "  is  a  modern  story  enclosing  a 
mediaeval  one.  In  the  moonshine  by  the  ruined  tower 
the  guileless  Genevieve  leans  against  the  statue  of  an 
armed  man,  while  her  lover  sings  her  a  tale  of  a  wan- 
dering knight  who  bore  a  burning  brand  upon  his  shield 
and  went  mad  for  the  love  of  "  The  Lady  of  the  Land."  * 
The  fragment  entitled  "  The  Dark  Ladie  "  was  begun 
as  a  "  sister  tale  "  to  "  Love."  The  hero  is  a  "  knight 
that  wears  the  griffin  for  his  crest."  There  are  only  fif- 
teen stanzas  of  it,  and  it  breaks  off  with  a  picture  of  an 
imaginary  bridal  procession,  whose  "  nodding  minstrels  " 
recall  "The  Ancient  Mariner,"  and  incidentally  some 
things  of  Chatterton's.  Lines  of  a  specifically  romantic 
colouring  are  of  course  to  be  found  scattered  about  nearly 
everywhere  in  Coleridge;  like  the  musical  little  song  that 
follows  the  invocation  to  the  soul  of  Alvar  in  "  Remorse  " : 

"And  at  evening  evermore, 
In  a  chapel  on  the  shore, 
Shall  the  chanters  sad  and  saintly — 
Yellow  tapers  burning  faintly — 
Doleful  masses  chant  for  thee, 
Miserere  Domine  /  " 

*  Brandl  thinks  that  this  furnished  Keats  with  a  hint  or  two 
for  his  "Belle  Dame  sans  Merci."  Coleridge's  "Dejection: 
An  Ode  "  is  headed  with  a  stanza  from  "the  grand  old  ballad 
of  Sir  Patrick  Spence." 


Coleridge j  Howies,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     87 

or  the  wild  touch  of  folk  poesy  in  that  marvellous  opium 
dream,  "  Kubla  Khan  " — the  "  deep  romantic  chasm  " : 

"A  savage  place,  as  holy  and  enchanted 
As  e'er  beneath  a  waning  moon  was  haunted 
By  woman  wailing  for  her  demon  lover. " 

Or  the  well-known  ending  of  "The  Knight's  Grave": 

"The  knight's  bones  are  dust, 
And  his  good  sword  rust ; 
His  soul  is  with  the  saints,  I  trust." 

In  taking  account  of  Coleridge's  services  to  the  cause 
of  romanticism,  his  critical  writings  should  not  be  over- 
looked. Matthew  Arnold  declared  that  there  was  some- 
thing premature  about  the  burst  of  creative  activity  in 
English  literature  at  the  opening  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, and  regretted  that  the  way  had  not  been  prepared, 
as  in  Germany,  by  a  critical  movement.  It  is  true  that 
the  English  romantics  put  forth  no  body  of  doctrine,  no 
authoritative  statement  of  a  theory  of  literary  art.  Scott 
did  not  pose  as  the  leader  of  a  school,  or  compose 
prefaces  and  lectures  like  Hugo  and  Schlegel*     As  a 

*"The  English  Romantic  critics  did  not  form  a  school. 
Like  everything  else  in  the  English  Romantic  movement,  its 
criticism  was  individual,  isolated,  sporadic,  unsystematised. 
It  had  no  official  mouthpiece,  like  Sainte-Beuve  and  the 
Globe;  its  members  formed  no  compact  phalanx  like  that 
which,  towards  the  close  of  our  period,  threw  itself  upon  the 
'  classiques'  of  Paris.  Nor  did  they,  with  the  one  exception  of 
Coleridge,  approach  the  Romantic  critics  of  Germany/in  range 
of  ideas,  in  grasp  of  the  larger  significance  of  their  own  move- 
ment. It  was  only  in  Germany  that  the  ideas  implicit  in  the 
great  poetic  revival  were  explicitly  thought  out  in  all  their 
many-sided  bearing  upon  society,  history,  philosophy,  relig- 
ion ;  and  that  the  problem  of  criticism,  in  particular,  was  pre- 
sented in  its  full  depth  and  richness  of  meaning.  ...  As 
English  Romanticism  achieved  greater  things  on  its  creative 
than  on  its  critical  side,  so  its  criticism  was  more  remarkable 


88  zA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

contributor  to  the  reviews  on  his  favourite  topics,  he  was 
no  despicable  critic;  shrewd,  good-natured,  full  of  spe- 
cial knowledge,  anecdote,  and  illustration.  But  his  crit- 
icism was  never  polemic,  and  he  had  no  quarrel  with  the 
classics.  He  cherished  an  unfeigned  admiration  for 
Dryden,  whose  life  he  wrote  and  whose  works  he 
edited.  Doubtless  he  would  cheerfully  have  admitted  the 
inferiority  of  his  own  poetry  to  Dryden's  and  Pope's. 
He  had  no  programme  to  announce,  but  just  went  ahead 
writing  romances ;  in  practice  an  innovator,  but  in  theory 
a  literary  conservative. 

Coleridge,  however,  was  fully  aware  of  the  scope  of  the 
new  movement.  He  represented,  theoretically  as  well 
as  practically,  the  reaction  against  eighteenth-century 
academicism,  the  Popean  tradition*  in  poetry,  and  the 
maxims  of  pseudo-classical  criticism.  In  his  analysis 
and  vindication  of  the  principles  of  romantic  art,  he 
brought  to  bear  a  philosophic  depth  and  subtlety  such  as 
had  never  before  been  applied  in  England  to  a  merely 
belletristic  subject.  He  revolutionised,  for  one  thing,  the 
critical  view  of  Shakspere,  devoting  several  lecture 
courses  to  the  exposition  of  the  thesis  that  "Shak- 
spere's  judgment  was  commensurate  with  his  genius." 
These  lectures  borrowed  a  number  of  passages  from  A. 
W.  von  Schlegel's  "  VorlesungenuberDramatische  Kunst 


on  that  side  which  is  akin  to  creation — in  the  subtle  apprecia- 
tion of  literary  quality — than  in  the  analysis  of  the  principles 
on  which  its  appreciation  was  founded "  (C.  H.  Herford : 
"The  Age  of  Wordsworth,"  p.  50). 

*  See  "Biographia  Literaria,"  chap.  i.  "From  the  com- 
mon opinion  that  the  English  style  attained  its  greatest  per- 
fection in  and  about  Queen  Anne's  reign,  I  altogether  dis- 
sent"  (Lecture  "On  Style,"  March  13,  1818). 


Coleridge,  Howies,  and  the  Tope  Controversy.     89 

und  Litteratur,"  delivered  at  Vienna  in  1808,  but  en- 
grafted with  original  matter  of  the  highest  value.  Com- 
pared with  these  Shakspere  notes,  with  the  chapters  on 
Wordsworth  in  the  "  Biographia  Literaria,"  and  with  the 
obiter  dicta  sown  through  Coleridge's  prose,  all  previous 
English  criticism  appears  crude  and  superficial,  and  the 
contemporary  squabble  over  Pope  like  a  scolding  match 
in  the  nursery. 

Coleridge's  acute  and  sympathetic  insight  into  the 
principles  of  Shaksperian  drama  did  not  save  him  from 
producing  his  abortive  "  Zapolya  "  in  avowed  imitation 
of  the  "  Winter's  Tale."  What  curse  is  on  the  English 
stage  that  men  who  have  done  work  of  the  highest  grade 
in  other  departments,  as  soon  as  they  essay  play  writing, 
become  capable  of  failures  like  "The  Borderers"  and 
"John  Woodville"  and  "Manfred"  and  "Zapolya"? 
As  for  "Remorse,"  with  its  Moorish  sea-coasts,  wild 
mountains,  chapel  interiors  with  painted  windows,  torch- 
light and  moonlight,  dripping  caverns,  dungeons,  daggers 
and  poisoned  goblets,  the  best  that  can  be  said  of  it  is 
that  it  is  less  bad  than  "Zapolya."  And  of  both  it  may 
be  said  that  they  are  romantic  not  after  the  fashion  of 
Shakspere,  but  of  those  very  German  melodramas  which 
Coleridge  ridiculed  in  his  "  Critique  on  Bertram."  * 

*  See  vol.  i.,  p.  421  ff. 


CHAPTER   III. 

fteats,  %cigb  l)unt,  anD  tbc  Dante  IRevfval. 

In  the  interchange  of  literary  wares  between  England 
and  Germany  during  the  last  years  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, it  is  observable  that  the  English  romantics  went  no 
further  back  than  to  their  own  contemporaries  for  their 
knowledge  of  the  Deutsche  Vergangenheit.  They  trans- 
lated or  imitated  robber  tragedies,  chivalry  tales,  and 
ghost  ballads  from  the  modern  restorers  of  the  Teutonic 
Mittelalter ;  but  they  made  no  draughts  upon  the  original 
storehouse  of  German  mediaeval  poetry.  There  was  no 
such  reciprocity  as  yet  between  England  and  the  Latin 
countries.  French  romanticism  dates,  at  the  earliest, 
from  Chateaubriand's  "Genie  du  Christianisme "  (1802), 
and  hardly  made  itself  felt  as  a  definite  force,  even  in 
France,  before  Victor  Hugo's  "Cromwell"  (1828).  But 
in  the  first  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century,  Italy,  Spain, 
and  France  began  to  contribute  material  to  the  English 
movement  in  the  shape  of  translations  like  Cary's  "  Di- 
vine Comedy"  (1814);  Lockhart's  "Spanish  Ballads" 
(1824);  Southey's  "  Amadisof  Gaul  "  (1803), "  Palmerin 
of  England"  (1807),  and  "The  Chronicle  of  the  Cid  " 
(1808);  and  Rose's*  "Partenopex  of  Blois"  (1807). 
By  far  the  most  influential  of  these  was  Cary's  "  Dante." 

*  Scott's  friend,  William  Stewart  Rose — to  whom  the  first 
verse  epistle  in  "  Marmion  "  is  addressed.  He  also  translated 
the  "Orlando.  Furioso"  (1823-31).  His  "Partenopex"  was 
made  from  a  version  in  modern  French. 

90 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  Tfante  %evtval.      91 

Hitherto  the  Italian  Middle  Age  had  impressed  itself 
upon  the  English  imagination  not  directly  but  through 
the  richly  composite  art  of  the  Renaissance  schools  of 
painting  and  poetry;  through  Raphael  and  his  followers; 
through  the  romances  of  Ariosto  and  Tasso  and  their 
English  scholar,  Spenser.  Elizabethan  England  had  been 
supplied  with  versions  of  the  "Orlando  Furioso"  *  and 
the  "  Gierusalemme  Liberata,"  by  Harrington  and  Fair- 
fax— the  latter  still  a  standard  translation  and  a  very  ac- 
complished piece  of  versification.  Warton  and  Hurd  and 
other  romanticising  critics  of  the  eighteenth  century  were 
perpetually  upholding  Ariosto  and  Tasso  against  French 
detraction  : 

"In  face  of  all  his  foes,  the  Cruscan  quire, 
And  Boileau,  whose  rash  envy  could  allow 
No  strain  which  shamed  his  country's  creaking  lyre, 
That  whetstone  of  the  teeth — monotony  in  wire  !  "  f 

IScott's  eager  championship  of  Ariosto  has  already  been 
mentioned.  J  j  But  the  stuff  of  the  old  Charlemagne  epos  is 
sophisticated  in  the  brilliant  pages  of  Ariosto,  who 
follows  Pulci  and  Boiardo,  if  not  in  burlesquing  chivalry 
outright,  yet  in  treating  it  with  a  half  irony.  Tasso  is 
serious,  but  submits  his  romantic  matter — Godfrey  of 
Boulogne  and  the  First  Crusade — to  the  classical  epic 
mould.  It  was  pollen  from  Italy,  but  not  Italy  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  that  fructified  English  poetry  in  the  six- 

*  A  new  translation  of  the  "Orlando,"  by  Hoole,  appeared 
in  1773-83;  of  Tasso's  "Jerusalem  "  in  1763;  and  of  Metasta- 
ses dramas  in  1767.  These  were  in  the  heroic  couplets  of 
Pope.  > 

f  "Childe  Harold,"  Canto  iv.,  xxxviii.  And  Cf.  vol.  i.,  pp. 
25,  49,  100,  170,  219,  222-26. 

%  Vide  supra,  p.  5. 


92  oA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

teenth  century.  Two  indeed  of  gli  antichi,  "the  all 
Etruscan  three,"  communicated  an  impulse  both  earlier 
and  later.  Love  sonneteering,  in  emulation  of  Petrarca, 
began  at  Henry  VIII. 's  court.  Chaucer  took  the  sub- 
stance of  "  Troilus  and  Creseyde  "  and  "  The  Knightes 
Tale"  from  Boccaccio's  "Filostrato"  and  "Teseide"; 
and  Dryctep,  who  never  mentions  Dante,  versified  three 
stories  from  the  "Decameron."  But  Petrarch  and 
Boccaccio  were  not  mediaeval  minds.  They  represent  the 
earlier  stages  of  humanism  and  the  new  learning.  Dante 
was  the  genuine  homme  du  moyen  age,  and  Dante  was 
the  latest  of  the  great  revivals.  "  Dante,"  says  Carlyle, 
"was  the  spokesman  of  the  Middle  Ages;  the  thought 
they  lived  by  stands  here  in  everlasting  music." 

The  difficulty,  not  to  say  obscurity,  of  the  "  Divine 
Comedy";  its  allusive,  elliptical  style;  its  scholasticism 
and  allegorical  method ;  its  multitudinous  references  to 
local  politics  and  the  history  of  thirteenth-century  Italy, 
defied  approach.  Above  all,  its  profound,  austere,  mys- 
tical spirituality  was  abhorrent  to  the  clear,  shallow 
rationalism  of  the  eighteenth  century,  as  well  as  to  the 
religious  liberalism  of  the  seventeenth  and  the  joyous 
sensuality  of  the  sixteenth.  Goethe  the  pagan  disliked 
Dante,  no  less  than  Scott  the  Protestant.*  In  particular, 
deistic  France,  arbiter  elegantiarum,  felt  with  a  shiver  of 
repulsion, 

"How  grim  the  master  was  of  Tuscan  song." 

"I  estimate  highly,"  wrote  Voltaire  to  an  Italian  cor- 
respondent, "  the  courage  with  which  you  have  dared  to 

*Vide  supra,  p.  40.  Goethe  pronounced  the  "Inferno" 
abominable,  the  "  Purgatorio  "  doubtful,  and  the  "  Paradiso  " 
tiresome  (Plumptre's  "Dante,"  London,  1887,  vol.  ii.,  p.  484). 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  Ttante  %evtval.       93 

say  that  Dante  was  a  madman  *  and  his  work  a  monster. 
.  .  .  There  are  found  among  us  and  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  people  who  strive  to  admire  imaginations  so 
stupid  and  barbarous."  A  French  translation  of  the 
"Divine  Comedy"  had  been  printed  by  the  Abbe  Gran- 
gierf  at  Paris  in  1596;  but  Rivarol,  whose  "Inferno" 
was  published  in  1783,  was  the  first  Frenchman,  says 
Lowell,  to  divine  Dante's  greatness.  The  earliest  Ger- 
man version  was  Bachenschwanz's  prose  translation  of 
the  "Commedia"  (Leipsic,  1767-69), J  but  the  German 
romantic  school  were  the  first  to  furnish  a  sympathetic 
interpretation  of  Dante  to  their  countrymen. 

Chaucer  was  well  acquainted  with  the  work  of  "  the 
grete  poet  of  Florence,"  and  drew  upon  him  occasionally, 
though  by  no  means  so  freely  as  upon  Boccaccio.  Thus 
in  "The  Monkes  Tale"  he  re-tells,  in  a  very  inferior 
fashion,  the  tragedy  of  Ugolino.  In  "The  Parliament  of 
Foules "  and  "  The  Hous  of  Fame "  there  are  distinct 
imitations  of  Dante.  A  passage  from  the  "  Purgatory  " 
is  quoted  in  the  "  Wif  of  Bathes  Tale,"  etc.  Spenser 
probably,  and  Milton  certainly,  knew  their  Dante.  Mil- 
ton's sonnet  to  Henry  Lawes  mentions  Dante's  en- 
counter with  the  musician  Casella  "  in  the  milder  shades 
of  Purgatory."  Here  and  there  a  reference  to  the  "Di- 
vine Comedy  "  occurs  in  some  seventeenth-century  Eng- 
lish prose  writer  like  Sir  Thomas  Browne  or  Jeremy  Tay- 
lor. It  is  thought  that  the  description  of  Hell  in 
Sackville's  "  Mirror  for  Magistrates  "  shows  an  acquaint- 

*  See  Walpole's  opinion,  vol.  i.,  p.  235. 

f  For  early  manuscript  renderings  see  "Les  Plus  Anciennes 
Traductions  Franchises  de  la  Divine  Comedie, "  par  C.  Morel, 
Paris,  1897. 

X  Lowell  says  Kannegiesser's,  1809. 


94  <^  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

ance  with  the  "  Inferno."  But  Dante  had  few  readers  in 
England  before  the  nineteenth  century.  He  was  prac- 
tically unknown  there  and  in  all  of  Europe  outside  of 
Italy.  "His  reputation/'  said  Voltaire,  "will  go  on  in- 
creasing because  scarce  anybody  reads  him."  And  half 
a  century  later  Napoleon  said  the  same  thing  in  the  same 
words:  "His  fame  is  increasing  and  will  continue  to  in- 
crease because  no  one  ever  reads  him."/ 

In  the  third  volume  of  his  "  History  of  English  Poetry  " 
(1781),  Thomas  Warton  had  spoken  of  the  "  Divine  Com- 
edy "  as  "  this  wonderful  compound  of  classical  and  ro- 
mantic fancy,  of  pagan  and  Christian  theology,  of  real 
and  fictitious  history,  of  tragical  and  comic  incidents,  of 
familiar  and  heroic  manners,  and  of  satirical  and  sub- 
lime poetry.  But  the  grossest  improprieties  of  this  poem 
discover  an  originality  of  invention,  and  its  absurdities 
often  border  on  sublimity.  We  are  surprised  that  a  poet 
should  write  one  hundred  cantos  on  hell,  paradise,  and 
purgatory.  But  this  prolixity  is  partly  owing  to  the  want 
of  art  and  method,  and  is  common  to  all  early  com- 
positions, in  which  everything  is  related  circumstantially 
and  without  rejection,  and  not  in  those  general  terms 
which  are  used  by  modern  writers."  Warton  is  shocked 
at  Dante's  "disgusting  fooleries"  and  censures  his  de- 
parture from  Virgilian  grace.  Milton  "  avoided  the 
childish  or  ludicrous  excesses  of  these  bold  inventions 
.  .  .  but  rude  and  early  poets  describe  everything."  But 
Warton  felt  Dante's  greatness.  "Hell,"  he  wrote, 
"grows  darker  at  his  frown."  He  singled  out  for  special 
mention  the  Francesca  and  Ugolino  episodes. 

If  Warton  could  write  thus  it  is  not  surprising  to  dis- 
cover among  classical  critics  either  a  total  silence  as  to 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  T)ante  Revival.      95 

Dante,  or  else  a  systematic  depreciation.  Addison  does 
not  mention  him  in  his  Italian  travels;  and  in  his  "Sat- 
urday papers  "  misses  the  very  obvious  chance  for  a  com- 
parison between  Dante  and  Milton  such  as  Macaulay 
afterwards  elaborated  in  his  essay  on  Milton.  Gold- 
smith, who  knew  nothing  of  Dante  at  first  hand,  wrote 
of  him  with  the  usual  patronising  ignorance  of  eighteenth- 
century  criticism  as  to  anything  outside  of  the  Greek 
and  Latin  classics :  "  He  addressed  a  barbarous  people 
in  a  method  suited  to  their  apprehension;  united  purga- 
tory and  the  river  Styx,  St.  Paul  and  Virgil,  heaven 
and  hell  together;  and  shows  a  strange  mixture  of  good 
sense  and  absurdity.  The  truth  is,  he  owes  most  of  his 
reputation  to  the  obscurity  of  the  times  in  which  he 
lived."  * 

In  1782,  William  Hay  ley,  the  biographer  of  Cowper 
and  author  of  that  very  mild  poem  "  The  Triumphs  of 
Temper,"  published  a  verse  "  Essay  on  Epic  Poetry " 
in  five  epistles.  In  his  notes  to  the  third  epistle,  he 
gave  an  outline  of  Dante's  life  with  a  translation  of 
his  sonnet  to  Guido  Cavalcanti  and  of  the  first  three  can- 
tos of  the  "  Inferno."  "  Voltaire,"  he  says,  has  spoken 
of  Dante  "  with  that  precipitate  vivacity  which  so  fre- 
quently led  the  lively  Frenchman  to  insult  the  reputation 
of  the  noblest  writers."  He  refers  to  the  "judicious  and 
spirited  summary  "  of  the  "  Divine  Comedy  "  in  Warton, 
and  adds,  "  We  have  several  versions  of  the  celebrated 
story  of  Ugolino;  but  I  believe  no  entire  canto  of  Dante 
has  hitherto  appeared  in  our  language.  .  .  .  The  author 
has  been  solicited  to  execute  an  entire  translation  of 
Dante,  but  the  extreme  inequality  of  this  poet  would  render 
*"  Present  State  of  Polite  Learning  "  (1759). 


96  aA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

such  a  work  a  very  laborious  undertaking;  and  it  appears 
very  doubtful  how  far  such  a  version  would  interest  our 
country.  Perhaps  the  reception  of  these  cantos  may  dis- 
cover to  the  translator  the  sentiments  of  the  public." 
Hayley  adopted  "triple  rhyme/'  i.e.,  the  terza  rima,  and 
said  that  he  did  not  recollect  it  had  ever  been  used 
before  in  English.  His  translation  is  by  no  means  con- 
temptible— much  better  than  Boyd's, — but  fails  entirely 
to  catch  Dante's  manner  or  to, keep  the  strange  precision 
and  picturesqueness  of  his  phrase.     Thus  he  renders 

"  Chi  per  lungo  silenzio  parea  fioco, " 

"  Whose  voice  was  like  the  whisper  of  a  lute  "  ; 

and  the  poet  is  made  to  address  Beatrice — O  donna  di 
virtu — as  "  bright  fair,"  as  if  she  were  one  of  the  belles 
in  "  The  Rape  of  the  Lock."  In  this  same  year  a  version 
of  the  "  Inferno  n  was  printed  privately  and  anonymously 
by  Charles  Rogers,  a  book  and  art  collector  and  a  friend 
of  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds.  But  the  first  complete  transla- 
tion of  the  "  Comedy  "  into  English  was  made  by  Henry 
Boyd,  a  clergyman  of  the  Irish  Church ;  the  "  Inferno  " 
in  1785  (with  a  specimen  from  Ariosto);  the  whole  in 
1802.  Boyd  was  a  quite  obscure  person,  author  among 
other  things  of  a  Spenserian  poem  entitled  "  The  Wood- 
man's Tale,"  and  his  translation  attracted  little  notice. 
In  his  introduction  he  compares  Dante  with  Homer,  and 
complains  that  "  the  venerable  old  bard  .  .  .  has  been 
long  neglected  " ;  perhaps,  he  suggests,  because  his  poem 
could  not  be  tried  by  Aristotle's  rules  or  submitted  to  the 
usual  classical  tests. 

"  Since  the  French,  the  restorers  of  the  art  of  criticism, 
cast  a  damp  upon  original  invention,  the  character  of 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  Tiante  Revival.      97 

Dante  has  been  thrown  under  a  deeper  shade.  That 
agreeable  and  volatile  nation  found  in  themselves  an 
insuperable  aversion  to  the  gloomy  and  romantic  bard, 
whose  genius,  ardent,  melancholy,  and  sublime,  was  so 
different  from  their  own." 

Boyd  used  a  six-lined  stanza,  a  singularly  ill  chosen 
medium  for  rendering  the  terza  rima ;  and  his  diction 
was  as  wordy  and  vague  as  Dante's  is  concise  and  sharp 
of  edge.     A  single  passage  will  illustrate  his  manner: 

"So  full  the  symphony  of  grief  arose, 
My  heart,  responsive  to  the  lovers'  woes, 

With  thrilling  sympathy  convulsed  my  breast. 
Too  strong  at  last  for  life  my  passion  grew, 
And,  sickening  at  the  lamentable  view, 

I  fell  like  one  by  mortal  pangs  oppressed."  * 

The  first  opportunity  which  the  mere  English  reader 
had  to  form  any  real  notion  of  Dante,  was  afforded  by 
Henry  Francis  Cary's  translation  in  blank  verse  (the 
"Inferno,"  with  the  Italian  text  in  1805;  the  entire 
"Commedia"  in  18 14,  with  the  title  "The  Vision  of 
Hell,  Purgatory,  and  Paradise  ").  This  was  a  work  of 
talent,  if  not  of  genius;  and  in  spite  of  the  numerous 
versions  in  prose  and  verse  that  have  since  appeared,  it 
continues  the  most  current  and  standard  Dante  in  Eng- 
land, if  not  in  America,  where  Longfellow  naturally 
challenges  precedence.  The  public  was  as  yet  so  un- 
prepared to  appreciate  Dante  that  Cary's  work  received 
little  attention  until  brought  into  notice  by  Coleridge; 
and  the  translator  was  deeply  chagrined  by  the  indiffer- 

*  "Mentre  che  l'uno  spirto  questo  disse, 
L'altro  piangeva  si,  che  di  pietade 
I  venni  men,  cosi  com'  io  morisse  ; 
E  cadde  come  corpo  morte  cade. " 

— "  Inferno, "  Canto  v. 


98  *4  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

ence,  not  to  say  hostility,  with  which  his  labours  were 
acknowledged.  In  the  memoir  *  of  Cary  by  his  son  there 
is  a  letter  from  Anne  Seward — the  Swan  of  Lichfield — 
which  throws  a  singular  light  upon  the  critical  taste  of 
the  "  snug  coterie  and  literary  lady  "  of  the  period.  She 
writes :  "  How  can  you  profess  to  be  charmed  with  the 
few  faint  outlines  of  landscape  painting  in  Dante,  who 
are  blind  to  the  beautiful,  distinct,  and  profuse  scenery 
in  the  pages  of  Ossian?"  She  goes  on  to  complain 
that  the  poem,  in  its  English  dress,  is  vulgar  and  obscure. 
Coleridge  devoted  to  Dante  a  part  of  his  series  of  lec- 
tures given  at  London  in  18 18,  reading  copious  selections 
from  Gary's  version.  The  translator  had  claimed,  in  his 
introduction,  that  the  Florentine  poet  "  leaves  to  Homer 
and  Shakespeare  alone  the  power  of  challenging  the  pre- 
eminence or  equality."  Coleridge  emphasized  the  "  end- 
less, subtle  beauties  of  Dante " ;  the  vividness,  logical 
connection,  strength,  and  energy  of  his  style.  In  this  he 
pronounced  him  superior  to  Milton ;  and  in  picturesque- 
ness  he  affirmed  that  he  surpassed  all  other  poets  ancient 
or  modern.  With  characteristic  penetration  he  indicated 
the  precise  position  of  Dante  in  mediaeval  literature;  his 
poetry  is  "the  link  between  religion  and  philosophy" ; 
it  is  "christianized,  but  without  the  further  Gothic  acces- 
sion of  proper  chivalry  " ;  it  has  that  "  inwardness  which 
.  .  .  distinguishes  all  the  classic  from  all  the  modern 
poetry."  It  was  perhaps  in  consequence  of  Coleridge's 
praise  that  Cary's  translation  went  into  its  second  edition 
in  18 19,  the  year  following  this  lecture  course.  A  third 
was  published  in  183 1.  Italians  used  to  complain  that 
the  foreign  reader's  knowledge  of  the  "Divine  Comedy" 
*  Vol.  i.,  p.  236. 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  cDa7tte  Revival.      99 

was  limited  to  the  "  Inferno,"  and  generally  to  the  Ugolino 
and  Francesca  passages.  Coleridge's  quotations  are  all 
from  the  "Inferno,"  and  Lowell  thinks  that  he  had  not 
read  beyond  it.  He  testified  that  the  Ugolino  and  Fran- 
cesca stories  were  already  "so  well  known  and  admired 
that  it  would  be  pedantry  to  analyse  them."  Sir  Joshua 
Reynolds  had  made  a  painting  of  the  former  subject.  In 
1800  William  Blake  produced  a  series  of  seven  engrav- 
ings in  illustration  of  the  "Inferno."  In  18 17  Flaxman 
began  his  illustrations  of  the  whole  "Commedia,"  ex- 
tending to  a  hundred  plates.* 

In  1819-20  Byron  was  living  at  Ravenna,  the  place  of 
Dante's  death  and  burial  f  and  of  the  last  years  of  his 
exile.  He  used  to  ride  for  hours  together  through  Ra- 
venna's "  immemorial  wood,"  J  and  the  associations  of 
the  scene  prompted  him  to  put  into  English  (March,  1820) 
the  Francesca  episode,  that  "thing  woven  as  out  of  rain- 
bows on  a  ground  of  eternal  black."  In  the  letter  to 
Murray,  sent  with  his  translation,  he  wrote:  "Enclosed 
you  will  find,  line  for  line,  in  third  rhyme  (terza'rima), 
of  which  your  British  blackguard 'reader  as  yet  under- 
stands nothing,  Fanny  of  Rimini.  You  know  that  she 
was  born  here,  and  married  and  slain,  from  Cary,  Boyd, 
and  such  people."  In  his  diary,  Byron  commented  scorn- 
fully on  Frederick  Schlegel's  assertions  that  Dante  had 
never  been  a  favourite  with  his  own  countrymen;    and 

*  Plumptre's  "Dante,"  vol.  ii.,  p.  439. 

f  "Ungrateful  Florence  !  Dante  sleeps  afar, 

Like  Scipio,  buried  by  the  upbraiding  shore. " 

— "Childe  Harold,"  iv.,  57. 
%  See  vol.  i.,  p.  49  ;  and  "  Purgatorio, "  xxviii.,  19-20. 

"Tal,  qual  di  ramo  in  ramo  si  raccoglie 
Per  la  pineta  in  sul  lito  di  Chiassi." 


ioo  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

that  his  main  defect  was  a  want  of  gentle  feelings.  "  Not 
a  favourite!  Why  they  talk  Dante — write  Dante — and 
think  and  dream  Dante  at  this  moment  (1821)  to  an  ex- 
cess which  would  be  ridiculous,  but  that  he  deserves  it. 
.  .  .  Of  gentle  feelings! — and  Francesca of  Rimini — and 
the  father's  feelings  in  Ugolino — and  Beatrice — and  *  La 
Pia ' !  Why  there  is  a  gentleness  in  Dante  beyond  all 
gentleness."  Byron  had  not  the  patience  to  be  a  good 
translator.  His  rendering  is  closer  and,  of  course,  more 
spirited  than  Hay  ley's ;  but  where  long  search  for  the 
right  word  was  needed,  and  a  delicate  shading  of  phrase 
to  reproduce  without  loss  the  meaning  of  this  most  mean- 
ing and  least  translatable  of  masters,  Byron's  work  shows 
haste  and  imperfection. 

"Love,  who  to  none  beloved  to  love  again 
Remits." 

is  neither  an  idiomatic  nor  in  any  way  an  adequate  eng- 
lishing  of 

"Amor,  che  a  nullo  amato  amar  perdona." 
Nor  does 

"Accursed  was  the  book  and  he  who  wrote," 

fully  give  the  force  of  the  famous 

"Galeotto  fu  il  libro,  e  chi  lo  scrisse."  * 

The  year  before  Byron  had  composed  "  The  Prophecy  of 
Dante,"  an  original  poem  in  four  cantos,  in  terza  rima, 

*  He  did  better  in  free  paraphrase  than  in  literal  transla- 
tion.    Cf.  Stanza  cviii.,  in  "Don  Juan,"  Canto  iii. — 

"  Soft  hour  !  which  wakes  the  wish  and  melts  the  heart  " — 

with  its  original  in  the  "  Purgatorio, "  viii.,  1-6. 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  T)ante  Revival,     101 

"...  imitative  rhyme, 
Harsh  Runic  copy  of  the  South's  sublime."  * 

The  poem  foretells  "the  fortunes  of  Italy  in  the  ensuing 
centuries,"  and  is  a  rheotorical  piece,  diffuse  and  de- 
clamatory, and  therein  quite  the  opposite  of  Dante.  It 
manifests  Byron's  self-conscious  habit  of  submitting  his 
theme  to  himself,  instead  of  losing  himself  in  his  theme. 
He  is  Dante  in  exile,  and  Gemma  Donati  is  Lady  Byron — 

"  That  fatal  she, 
Their  mother,  the  cold  partner  who  hath  brought 
Destruction  for  a  dowry — this  to  see 
And  feel  and  know  without  repair,  hath  taught 
A  bitter  lesson  ;  but  it  leaves  me  free  : 
I  have  not  vilely  found  nor  basely  sought, 
They  made  an  exile  not  a  slave  of  me." 

Dante's  bitter  and  proud  defiance  found  a  response  in 
Byron's  nature,  but  his  spirit,  as  a  whole,  the  English 
poet  was  not  well  fitted  to  interpret.  In  the  preface  to 
"  The  Prophecy,"  Byron  said  that  he  had  not  seen  the 
terza  rima  tried  before  in  English,  except  by  Hayley, 
whose  translation  he  knew  only  from  an  extract  in  the 
notes  to  Beckford's  "  Vathek." 

Shelley's  knowledge  and  appreciation  of  Dante  might 
be  proved  from  isolated  images  and  expressions  in  many 
parts  of  his  writings.  He  translated  the  sonnet  to  Guido 
Cavalcanti  with  greater  freedom  and  elegance  than  Hay- 
ley,  and  wrote  a  short  copy  of  verses  on  the  Hunger 
Tower  at  Pisa,  the  scene  of  Ugolino's  sufferings.  In  the 
preface  to  "  Epipsychidion  "  he  cites  the  "  Vita  Nuova  " 
as  the  utterance  of  an  idealised  and  spiritualised  love 
like  that  which  his  own  poem  records.  In  the  "  Defence 
of  Poetry  "  he  pays  a  glowing  tribute  to  Dante  as  the 

*  Dedication  to  La  Guiccioli. 


102  <:A  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

second  of  epic  poets  and  "  the  first  awakener  of  entranced 
Europe."  His  poetry  is  the  bridge  "  which  unites  the 
modern  and  the  ancient  world."  Contrary  to  the  prevail- 
ing critical  tradition,  Shelley  preferred  the  "  Purgatory  " 
and  the  " Paradise "  to  the  "Hell."  Shelley  also  em- 
ployed terza  rima  in  his  fragmentary  pieces,  "Prince 
Athanase,"  "The  Triumph  of  Life,"  "The  Woodman  and 
the  Nightingale,"  and  in  one  of  his  best  lyrics,  the  "  Ode 
to  the  West  Wind,"  *  written  in  1819  "in  a  wood  that 
skirts  the  Arno,  near  Florence."  This  linked  measure, 
so  difficult  for  the  translator  and  which  gives  a  hampered 
movement  to  Byron's  and  Hayley's  specimens  of  the  "  In- 
ferno," Shelley  may  be  said  to  have  really  domesticated 
in  English  verse  by  his  splendid  handling  of  it  in  orig- 
inal work: 

"  Make  me  thy  lyre  even  as  the  forest  is : 
What  if  my  leaves  are  falling,  like  its  own? 
The  tumult  of  thy  mighty  harmonies 
Will  take  from  both  a  deep  autumnal  tone, 
Sweet  though  in  sadness.     Be  thou,  spirit  fierce, 
My  spirit !     Be  thou  me,  impetuous  one  !  " 

Shelley  expressed  to  Medwin  his  dissatisfaction  with 
all  English  renderings  from  Dante — even  with  Cary — and 
announced  his  intention,  or  desire,  to  translate  the  whole 
of  the  "  Divine  Comedy  "  in  terza  rima.  Two  specimens 
of  this  projected  version  he  gave  in  "Ugolino,"  and 
"Matilda  Gathering  Flowers"  ("Purg.,"  xxviii.,  1-5 1). 
He  also  made  a  translation  of  the  first  canzone  of  the 
"  Convito." 

After  the  appearance  of  Cary's  version,  critical  com- 

*But  in  this  poem  each  thirteenth  and  fourteenth  line  make 
a  couplet,  thus  breaking  up  the  whole  into  a  series  of  loose 
sonnets. 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  'Dante  ^Revival.     103 

prehension  of  Dante  grew  rapidly.  In  the  same  year 
when  Coleridge  gave  his  lectures,  Hallam  published  his 
"Middle  Ages,"  which  contained  a  just  though  somewhat 
coldly  worded  estimate  of  the  great  Italian.  This  was 
amplified  in  his  later  work,  "The  Literature  of  Europe" 
(1838-39).  Hallam  said  that  Dante  was  the  first  name 
in  the  literature  of  trie  Middle  Ages,  the  creator  of  his 
nation's  poetry,  and  the  most  original  of  all  writers,  and 
the  most  concise.  But  he  blamed  him  for  obscurity, 
forced  and  unnatural  turns  of  expression,  and  barbarous 
licenses  of  idiom.  The  "  Paradise  "  seemed  to  him  tedi- 
ous, as  a  whole,  and  much  of  the  "  Purgatory  "  heavy. 
Hallam  repeated,  if  he  did  not  originate  that  nice  bit  of 
discernment,  that  in  his  "Paradise"  Dante  uses  only 
three  leading  ideas — light,  music,  and  motion.  Then 
came  Macaulay's  essay  "  Milton,"  in  the  Edinburgh  for 
1825,  with  the  celebrated  parallel  between  the  "Divine 
Comedy  "  and  the  "  Paradise  Lost,"  and  the  contrast  be- 
tween Dante's  "  picturesque  "  and  Milton's  "  imaginative  " 
method.  Macaulay's  analysis  has  been  questioned  by 
Ruskin  and  others ;  some  of  his  positions  were  perhaps 
mistaken,  but  they  were  the  most  advanced  that  English 
Dante  criticism  had  as  yet  taken  up.  And  finally  came 
Carlyle's  vivid  piece  of  portrait  painting  in  "  Hero  Wor- 
ship" (1841).  The  first  literal  prose  translation  of  any 
extent  from  the  "Commedia"  was  the  "Inferno"  by 
Carlyle's  brother  John  (1849). 

Since  the  middle  of  the  century  Dante  study  and  Dante 
literature  in  English-speaking  lands  have  waxed  enor- 
mously. Dante  societies  have  been  founded  in  England 
and  America.  Almost  every  year  sees  another  edition,  a 
new  commentary  or  a  fresh  translation  in  prose,  in  blank 


104  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

verse,  in  terza  rima,  or  in  some  form  of  stanza.  It  is 
not  exaggerating  to  say  that  there  is  more  public  mention 
of  Dante  now  in  a  single  year  than  in  all  the  years  of  the 
eighteenth  century  together.  It  would  be  interesting,  if 
it  were  possible,  to  count  the  times  that  Dante's  name 
occurs  in  English  writings  of  the  eighteenth  and  then  of 
the  nineteenth  century;  afterwards  to  do  the  same  with 
Ariosto  and  Tasso  and  compare  the  results.  It  would  be 
found  that,  while  the  eighteenth  century  set  no  very  high 
value  on  Ariosto  and  Tasso,  it  ignored  Dante  altogether; 
and  that  the  nineteenth  has  put  aside  the  superficial  medi- 
aevalism  of  the  Renaissance  romancers  and  gone  back  to 
the  great  religious  romancer  of  the  Italian  Middle  Age. 
There  is  no  surer  plummet  than  Dante's  to  sound  the 
spiritual  depth  of  a  time.  It  is  in  the  nineteenth  century 
first  that  Shakspere  and  Dante  took  possession  of  the 
European  mind.  In  1800  Shakspere  was  an  English, 
or  at  most  an  English  and  German  poet,  and  Dante 
exclusively  an  Italian.  In  1900  they  had  both  become 
world  poets.  Shakspere's  foreign  conquests  were  the 
earlier  and  are  still  the  wider,  as  wide  perhaps  as  the 
expanse — 

"That  deep-browed  Homer  ruled  as  his  demesne." 

But  the  ground  that  Dante  has  won  he  holds  with  equal 
secureness.  Not  that  he  will  ever  be  popular,  in  Shak- 
spere's way;  and  yet  it  is  far  gone  when  the  aesthete  in 
a  comic  opera  is  described  as  a  "  Francesca  da  Rimini 
young  man." 

As  a  stimulus  to  creative  work  thre  influence  of  Dante, 
though  not  entirely  absent,  is  not  conspicuous  in  the  first 
half  of  the  century.  \  It  is  not  until  the  time  of  the  Ros- 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  T>ante  %evivaL     105 

settis  in  England  and  of  Longfellow  and  Dr.  Parsons  in 
America  that  any  poetry  of  a  really  Dantesque  inspira- 
tion and,  at  the  same  time,  of  high  original  value  was 
added  to  our  literature.*/ 

The  first  fruits  of  the  Dante  revival  in  England,  in  the 
shape  of  original  production,  was  Leigh  Hunt's  "  Story 
of  Rimini"  (1816)— "Mr.  Hunt's  smutty  story  of  Ri- 
mini," as  the  Tory  wits  of  Blackwood  were  fond  of  calling 
it  in  their  onslaughts  upon  the  Cockney  school.  This 
was  a  romaunt  in  four  cantos  upon  the  already  familiar 
episode  of  Francesca,  that  "  lily  in  the  mouth  of  Tartarus." 
Hunt  took  Dryden's  "  Fables  "  as  his  model  in  versifica- 
tion, employing  the  heroic  couplet  with  the  frequent  va- 
riation of  the  triplet  and  the  alexandrine.  The  poem  is 
not  at  all  Dantesque  in  its  lax  and  fluent  sweetness,  and 
in  that  colloquial,  familiar  manner  which  is  constant  in 
all  Hunt's  writing,  both  prose  and  verse;  reminding 
one,  at  its  best,  of  Chaucer,  who  was,  indeed,  one  of  his 
favourite  masters.  Hunt  softens  the  ferocity  of  the  tale 
as  given  by  Boccaccio,  according  to  whom  the  husband 
Giovanni  Malatesta  was  a  cripple,  and  killed  the  lovers 
in  flagrante  delicto.  Hunt  makes  him  a  personable  man, 
though  of  proud  and  gloomy  temper.  He  slays  his 
brother  Paolo  in  chivalrous  fashion  and  in  single  combat, 
and  Francesca  dies  of  a  broken  heart.  The  descriptive 
portions  of  the  "  Story  of  Rimini"  are  charming:    the 


*  T.  W.  Parsons'  "Lines  on  a  Bust  of  Dante"  appeared  in 
the  Boston  Advertiser  in  1841.  His  translation  of  the  first 
ten  cantos  of  the  "Inferno"  was  published  in  1843:  later  in- 
stalments in  1867  and  1893.  Longfellow's  version  of  the 
"Divine  Comedy  "  with  the  series  of  sonnets  by  the  translator 
came  out  in  1867-70.  For  the  Dante  work  of  the  Rossettis, 
vide  infra,  pp.  282^". 


106  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

feudal  procession  with  trumpeters,  heralds,  squires,  and 
knights,  sent  to  escort  home  the  bride;  the  pine  forest 
outside  Ravenna;  and  the  garden  at  Rimini  in  which  the 
lovers  used  to  meet — 

"Places  of  nestling  green  for  poets  made." 

Hunt  had  a  quick  eye  for  colour;  a  fondness,  not  al- 
together free  from  affectation,  for  dainty  phrases;  and 
a  feminine  love  of  little  niceties  in  dress,  tapestry, 
needlework,  and  furnishings.  The  poem  was  written 
mostly  in  prison  where  its  author  spent  two  years  for  a 
libel  on  the  Prince  Regent.  Byron  used  to  visit  him 
there  and  bring  him  books  bearing  on  Francesca's  his- 
tory. Hunt  brought  into  the  piece  romantic  stuff  from 
various  sources,  including  a  summary  of  the  book  which 
betrayed  the  lovers  to  their  fatal  passion,  the  romance  of 
"  Lancelot  du  Lac."  And  Giovanni  speaks  to  his  dying 
brother  a  paraphrase  of  the  celebrated  eulogy  pronounced 
over  Lancelot  by  Sir  Ector  in  the  "Morte  Darthur": 

"And.  Paulo,  thou  wert  the  completest  knight 
That  ever  rode  with  banner  to  the  fight ; 
And  thou  wert  the  most  beautiful  to  see, 
That  ever  came  in  press  of  chivalry  : 
And  of  a  sinful  man  thou  wert  the  best 
That  ever  for  his  friend  put  spear  in  rest ; 
And  thou  wert  the  most  meek  and  cordial 
That  ever  among  ladies  eat  in  hall ; 
And  thou  wert  still,  for  all  that  bosom  gored, 
The  kindest  man  that  ever  struck  with  sword." 

Hunt  makes  the  husband  discover  his  wife's  infidelity 
by  overhearing  her  talking  in  her  sleep.  In  many  other 
particulars  he  enfeebles,  dandifies,  and  sentimentalises 
Dante's  fierce,  abrupt  tragedy;  holding  the  reader  by  the 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  T>ante  %evival.     107 

button  while  he  prattles  in  his  garrulous  way  of  Paulo's 

"taste"— 

"  The  very  nose,  lightly  yet  firmly  wrought, 
Showed  taste  " — 
and  of 

"The  two  divinest  things  in  earthly  lot, 
A  lovely  woman  in  a  rural  spot !  " 

a  couplet  which  irresistibly  suggests  suburban  picnics. 

Yet  no  one  in  his  generation  did  more  than  Leigh 
Hunt  to  familiarise  the  English  public  with  Italian  ro- 
mance. He  began  the  study  of  Italian  when  he  was  a 
schoolboy  at  Christ  Hospital,  being  attracted  to  Ariosto 
by  a  picture  of  Angelica  and  Medoro,  in  West's  studio. 
Like  his  friend  Keats,  on  whose  "Eve  of  St.  Agnes"  he 
wrote  an  enthusiastic  commentary,*  Hunt  was  eclectic  in 
his  choice  of  material,  drawing  inspiration  impartially 
from  the  classics  and  the  romantics;  but,  like  Keats,  he 
became  early  a  declared  rebel  against  eighteenth-century 
traditions  and  asserted  impulse  against  rule.  "  In  anti- 
quarian corners,"  he  says,  in  writing  of  the  influences  of 
his  childish  days,  "  Percy's  'Reliques '  were  preparing  a 
nobler  age  both  in  poetry  and  prose."  At  school  he  fell 
passionately  in  love  with  Collins  and  Gray,  composed  a 
"Winter"  in  imitation  of  Thomson,  one  hundred  stanzas 
of  a  "  Fairy  King  "  in  emulation  of  Spenser,  and  a  long 
poem  in  Latin  inspired  by  Gray's  odes  and  Malet's 
"Northern  Antiquities."  In  1802  [aetate  18]  he  pub- 
lished a  volume  of  these  juvenilia — odes  after  Collins  and 
Gray,  blank  verse  after  Thomson  and  Akenside,  and  a 
"  Palace  of  Pleasure  "  after  Spenser's  "  Bower  of  Bliss."  f 

*" The  Seer." 

t  He  named  a  daughter,  born  while  he  was  in  prison,  after 
Spenser's  Florimel. 


108  zA  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

It  was  in  this  same  year  that  on  a  visit  to  Oxford,  he  was 
introduced  to  Kett,  the  professor  of  poetry,  who  expressed 
a  hope  that  the  youthful  bard  might  be  inspired  by  "  the 
muse  of  Warton,"  whom  Hunt  had  never  read.  There 
had  fallen  in  Hunt's  way  when  he  was  a  young  man, 
Bell's  edition  of  the  poets,  which  included  Chaucer  and 
Spenser.  "The  omission  of  these  in  Cooke's  edition," 
he  says,  "  was  as  unpoetical  a  sign  of  the  times  as  the 
present  familiarity  with  their  names  is  the  reverse.  It 
was  thought  a  mark  of  good  sense ;  as  if  good  sense,  in 
matters  of  literature,  did  not  consist  as  much  in  knowing 
what  was  poetical  poetry,  as  brilliant  wit."  Of  his 
"Feast  of  the  Poets"  (1814)  he  writes:  *  "I  offended  all 
the  critics  of  the  old  or  French  school,  by  objecting  to 
the  monotony  of  Pope's  versification,  and  all  the  critics  of 
the  new  or  German  school  by  laughing  at  Wordsworth." 
In  the  preface  to  his  collected  poems  [1832]  occurs  the 
following  interesting  testimony  to  the  recentness  of  the 
new  criticism.  "  So  long  does  fashion  succeed  in  palm- 
ing its  petty  instincts  upon  the  world  for  those  of  a  nation 
and  of  nature,  that  it  is  only  of  late  years  that  the  French 
have  ceased  to  think  some  of  the  most  affecting  passages 
in  Shakespeare  ridiculous.  .  .  .  Yet  the  English  them- 
selves, no  great  while  since,  half  blushed  at  these  criti- 
cisms, and  were  content  if  the  epithet  *  bizarre  '  ('  voire 
bizarre  Shakespeare ')  was  allowed  to  be  translated  into 
1  a  wild,  irregular  genius.'  Everything  was  wild  and 
irregular  except  rhymesters  in  toupees.  A  petty  con- 
spiracy of  decorums  took  the  place  of  what  was  becoming 
to  humanity."  In  the  summer  of  1822  Hunt  went  by 
sailing  vessel  through  the  Mediterranean  to  Italy.  The 
*"  Autobiography,"  p.  200  (ed.  of  1870). 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  'Dante  'Revival.     109 

books  which  he  read  chiefly  on  board  ship  were  "  Don 
Quixote,"  Ariosto,  and  Berni;  and  his  diary  records 
the  emotion  with  which  he  coasted  the  western  shores  of 
Spain,  the  ground  of  Italian  romance,  where  the  Pay- 
nim  chivalry  used  to  land  to  go  against  Charlemagne: 
the  scene  of  Boiardo's  "Orlando  Inamorato"  and  Ari- 
osto's  "  Orlando  Furioso."  "  I  confess  I  looked  at  these 
shores  with  a  human  interest,  and  could  not  help  feeling 
that  the  keel  of  our  vessel  was  crossing  a  real  line,  over 
which  knights  and  lovers  had  passed.  And  so  they 
have,  both  real  and  fabulous;  the  former  not  less  roman- 
tic, the  latter  scarcely  less  real.  .  .  .  Fair  speed  your 
sails  over  the  lucid  waters, ye  lovers,  on  a  lover-like  sea! 
Fair  speed  them,  yet  never  land;  for  where  the  poet  has 
left  you,  there  ought  ye,  as  ye  are,  to  be  living  forever — 
forever  gliding  about  a  summer  sea,  touching  at  its  flow- 
ery islands  and  reposing  beneath  its  moon." 

Hunt's  sojourn  in  Italy,  where  he  lived  in  close  asso- 
ciation with  Byron  and  Shelley,  enabled  him  \.o  preciser 
his  knowledge  of  the  Italian  language  and  literature.  In 
1846  he  published  a  volume  of  "Stories  from  the  Italian 
Poets,"  containing  a  summary  or  free  paraphrase  in  prose 
of  the  "  Divine  Comedy  "  and  the  poems  of  Pulci,  Boi- 
ardo,  Ariosto,  and  Tasso,  "  with  comments  throughout, 
occasional  passages  versified  and  critical  notices  of  the 
lives  and  genius  of  the  authors."  Like  our  own  roman- 
ticist poet  Longfellow,  who  rediscovered  Europe  for 
America,  Leigh  Hunt  was  a  sympathetic  and  interpreta- 
tive rather  than  a  creative  genius;  and  like  Longfellow, 
an  admirable  translator.  Among  his  collected  poems  are 
a  number  of  elegant  and  spirited  versions  from  various 
mediaeval  literatures.     "  The  Gentle  Armour  "  is  a  play- 


no  z/1  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

ful  adaptation  of  a  French  fabliau  "  Les  Trois  Chevaliers 
et  la  Chemise,"  which  tells  of  a  knight  whose  hard-hearted 
lady  set  him  the  task  of  fighting  his  two  rivals  in  the 
lists,  armed  only  in  her  smock;  and,  in  contrition  for 
this  harsh  imposure,  went  to  the  altar  with  her  faith- 
ful champion,  wearing  only  the  same  bloody  sark  as  her 
bridal  garment.  At  least  this  is  the  pretty  turn  which 
Hunt  gave  to  the  story.  In  the  original  it  had  a  coarser 
ending.  There  are  also,  among  these  translations  from 
mediaeval  sources,  the  Latin  drinking  song  attributed  to 
Walter  Map— 

Mihi  est  ftroposituni  in  taberna  mori — 

and  Andrea  de  Basso's  terrible  "  Ode  to  a  Dead  Body," 
in  fifteenth-century  Italian;  which  utters,  with  extraor- 
dinary power,  the  ascetic  thought  of  the  Middle  Age, 
dwelling  with  a  kind  of  gloomy  exultation  on  the  foulness 
of  the  human  frame  in  decay. 

In  the  preface  to  his  "  Italian  Poets,"  Hunt  speaks  of 
"  how  widely  Dante  has  re-attracted  of  late  the  attention 
of  the  world."  He  pronounces  him  "  the  greatest  poet  for 
intensity  that  ever  lived,"  and  complains  that  his  metri- 
cal translators  have  failed  to  render  his  "passionate, 
practical,  and  creative  style — a  style  which  may  be  said 
to  write  things  instead  of  words."  Hunt's  introduction 
is  a  fine  piece  of  critical  work.  His  alert,  sparkling,  and 
nimble  intellect — somewhat  lacking  in  concentration  and 
seriousness — but  sensitive  above  all  things  to  the  pic- 
turesque, was  keenly  awake  to  Dante's  poetic  greatness. 
On  the  other  hand,  his  cheerful  philosophy  and  tolerant, 
not  to  say  easy-going  moral  nature,  was  shocked  by  the 
Florentine's  bitter  pride,  and  by  what  he  conceives  to  be 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  *Dante  "Revival.     1 1 1 

his  fanaticism,  bigotry,  superstition,  and  personal  vindic- 
tiveness,  when 

"  Hell  he  peoples  with  his  foes, 
Dark  scourge  of  many  a  guilty  line. " 

Hunt  was  a  Universalist,  and  Dante  was  a  Catholic 
Calvinist.  There  was  a  determined  optimism  about 
Hunt,  and  a  buoyancy  as  of  a  cork  or  other  light  body, 
sometimes  a  little  exasperating  to  men  of  less  sanguine 
temperament.*  He  ends  by  protesting  that  Dante  is  a 
semi-barbarian  and  his  "  Divine  Comedy "  too  often  an 
infernal  tragedy.  "  Such  a  vision  as  that  of  his  poem 
(in  a  theological  point  of  view)  seems  no  better  than  the 
dream  of  an  hypochondriacal  savage."  It  was  some 
years  before  this,  in  his  lecture  on  "  The  Hero  as  Poet," 
delivered  in  1840,  that  a  friend  of  Leigh  Hunt,  of  a  tem- 
perament quite  the  opposite  of  his,  had  spoken  a  very 
different  word  touching  this  cruel  scorn — this  sceva  indig- 
natio  of  Dante's.  Carlyle,  like  Hunt,  discovered  i?ite?isity 
to  be  the  prevailing  character  of  Dante's  genius,  em- 
blemed by  the  pinnacle  of  the  city  of  Dis ;  that  "  red-hot 
cone  of  iron  glowing  through  the  dim  immensity  of 
gloom."  Hunt,  the  Universalist,  said  of  Dante,  "when 
he  is  sweet-natured  once  he  is  bitter  a  hundred  times." 
"Infinite  pity,"  says  Carlyle,  the  Calvinist,  "yet  also  in- 
finite rigour  of  law;  it  is  so  nature  is  made;  it  is  so 
Dante  discerned  that  she  was  made.  What  a  paltry  no- 
tion is  that  of  his  '  Divine  Comedy's '  being  a  poor  sple- 
netic, impotent  terrestrial  libel;  putting  those  into  hell 
whom  he  could  not  be  avenged  upon  on  earth !     I  suppose 

*  See  Dickens'  caricature  of  him  as  Harold  Skimpole  in 
*  Bleak  House." 


ii2  <iA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

if  ever  pity  tender  as  a  mother's  was  in  the  heart  of  any 
man,  it  was  in  Dante's.  But  a  man  who  does  not  know 
rigour  cannot  pity  either.  His  very  pity  will  be  cowardly, 
egoistic — sentimentality,  or  little  better.  .  .  .  Morally 
great  above  all  we  must  call  him;  it  is  the  beginning  of 
all.  His  scorn, his  grief  are  as  transcendent  as  his  love; 
as,  indeed,  what  are  they  but  the  inverse  or  converse  of 
his  love?  " 

It  is  interesting  to  note  that,  antipathetic  as  Hunt's 
nature  was,  in  many  ways,  not  only  to  the  individual 
Dante  but  to  the  theological  thought  of  which  he  was  the 
spokesman,  in  his  view  of  the  sacred  art  of  the  Italian 
Middle  Age  he  anticipated  the  Pre-Raphaelites  and  the 
modern  interpreters  of  Dante.  Here  is  a  part  of  what 
he  says  of  the  paintings  in  the  Campo  Santo  at  Pisa: 
"  The  best  idea,  perhaps,  which  I  can  give  an  English- 
man of  the  general  character  of  the  painting  is  by  refer- 
ring him  to  the  engravings  of  Albert  Durer  and  the  seri- 
ous parts  of  Chaucer.  There  is  the  same  want  of  proper 
costume — the  same  intense  feeling  of  the  human  being, 
both  in  body  and  soul — the  same  bookish,  romantic,  and 
retired  character — the  same  evidences,  in  short,  of  antiq- 
uity and  commencement,  weak  (where  it  is  weak)  for 
want  of  a  settled  art  and  language,  but  strong  for  that 
very  reason  in  first  impulses,  and  in  putting  down  all 
that  is  felt.  .  .  .  The  manner  in  which  some  of  the  hoary 
saints  in  these  pictures  pore  over  their  books  and  carry 
their  decrepit  old  age,  full  of  a  bent  and  absorbed  feeble- 
ness— the  set  limbs  of  the  warriors  on  horseback — the 
sidelong  unequivocal  looks  of  some  of  the  ladies  playing 
on  harps  and  conscious  of  their  ornaments — the  people 
of  fashion  seated  in  rows,  with  Time  coming  up  unawares 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  ^Dante  "T^evival.     113 

to  destroy  them — the  other  rows  of  elders  and  doctors  of 
the  Church,  forming  part  of  the  array  of  heaven — the 
uplifted  hand  of  Christ  denouncing  the  wicked  at  the 
day  of  judgment — the  daring  satires  occasionally  intro- 
duced against  monks  and  nuns — the  profusion  of  atti- 
tudes, expressions,  incidents,  broad  draperies,  ornaments 
of  all  sorts,  visions,  mountains,  ghastly  looking  cities, 
fiends,  angels,  sibylline  old  women,  dancers,  virgin  brides, 
mothers  and  children,  princes,  patriarchs,  dying  saints; 
it  would  be  simply  blind  injustice  to  the  superabundance 
and  truth  of  conception  in  all  this  multitude  of  imagery 
not  to  recognize  the  real  inspirers  as  well  as  harbingers 
of  Raphael  and  Michael  Angelo,  instead  of  confining  the 
honour  to  the  Masaccios  and  Peruginos,  [who]  .  .  .  are 
no  more  to  be  compared  with  them  than  the  sonneteers 
of  Henry  VIII.  's  time  are  to  be  compared  with  Chaucer. 
Even  in  the  very  rudest  of  the  pictures,  where  the  souls 
of  the  dying  are  going  out  of  their  mouths,  in  the  shape 
of  little  children,  there  are  passages  not  unworthy  of 
Dante  and  Michael  Angelo.  .  .  .  Giotto,  be  thou  one  to 
me  hereafter,  of  a  kindred  brevity,  solidity,  and  stateli- 
ness  with  that  of  thy  friend,  Dante!  "  * 

Among  all  the  writers  of  his  generation,  Keats  was 
most  purely  the  poet,  the  artist  of  the  beautiful.     His 

*  "  When  I  was  last  at  Haydon's,"  wrote  Keats  to  his  brother 
George  in  1 818-19,  "I  looked  over  a  book  of  prints  taken  from 
the  fresco  of  the  church  at  Milan,  the  name  of  which  I  forget. 
In  it  were  comprised  specimens  of  the  first  and  second  age 
of  art  in  Italy.  I  do  not  think  I  ever  had  a  greater  treat  out 
of  Shakespeare  ;  full  of  romance  and  the  most  tender  feeling  ; 
magnificence  of  drapery  beyond  everything  I  ever  saw,  not 
excepting  Raphael's — but  grotesque  to  a  curious  pitch — yet 
still  making  up  a  fine  whole,  even  finer  to  me  than  more  ac- 
complished works,  as  there  was  left  so  much  room  for  imagi- 
nation. " 


ii4  ^  History  of  English  l^omanticism. 

sensitive  imagination  thrilled  to  every  touch  of  beauty 
from  whatever  quarter.  That  his  work  is  mainly  retro- 
spective and  eclectic  in  subject  is  because  a  young  poet's 
mind  responds  more  readily  to  books  than  to  life,  and 
this  young  poet  did  not  outlive  his  youth.  In  the  Greek 
mythology  he  found  a  world  of  lovely  images  ready  to 
his  hand ;  «in  the  poetry  of  Spenser,  Chaucer,  and  Ariosto 
he  found  another  such  world.  Arcadia  and  Faery  land — 
"the  realms  of  gold" — he  rediscovered  them  both  for 
himself,  and  he  struck  into  the  paths  that  wound  through 
their  ^enchanted  thickets  with  the  ardour  of  an  explorer. 
This  was  the  very  mood  of  the  Renaissance — this  genial 
heat  which  fuses  together  the  pagan  and  the  Christian 
systems — this  indifference  of  the  creative  imagination  to 
the  mere  sources  and  materials  of  its  creations.  Indeed, 
there  is  in  Keats'  style  a  "  natural  magic  "  which  forces 
us  back  to  Shakspere  for  comparison ;  a  noticeable  like- 
ness to  the  diction  of  the  Elizabethans,  when  the  classics 
were  still  a  living  spring  of  inspiration,  and  not  a  set  of 
copies  held  in  terrorem  over  the  head  of  every  new  poet. 
Keats'  break  with  the  classical  tradition  was  early  and 
decisive.  In  his  first  volume  (1817)  there  is  a  piece  en- 
titled "Sleep  and  Poetry,"  composed  after  a  night  passed 
at  Leigh  Hunt's  cottage  near  Hampstead,  which  contains 
his  literary  declaration  of  faith.  After  speaking  of  the 
beauty  that  fills  the  universe,  and  of  the  office  of  Imag- 
ination to  be  the  minister  and  interpreter  of  this  beauty, 
as  in  the  old  days  when  "  here  her  altar  shone,  even  in 
this  isle,"  and  "the  muses  were  nigh  cloyed  with 
honours, "  he  asks : 

"Could  all  this  be  forgotten?    Yes,  a  schism 
Nurtured  by  foppery  and  barbarism, 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  IDante  ^vival.     115 

Made  great  Apollo  blush  for  this,  his  land. 
Men  were  thought  wise  who  could  not  understand 
His  glories:  with  a  puling  infant's  force, 
They  swayed  about  upon  a  rocking  horse 
And  thought  it  Pegasus.     Ah,  dismal-souled  ! 
The  winds  of  heaven  blew,  the  ocean  rolled 
Its  gathering  waves — ye  felt  it  not.     The  blue 
Bowed  its  eternal  bosom,  and  the  dew 
Of  summer  night  collected  still,  to  make 
The  morning  precious.     Beaut)7  was  awake  ! 
Why  were  ye  not  awake?    But  ye  were  dead 
To  things  ye  knew  not  of — were  closely  wed 
To  musty  laws,  lined  out  with  wretched  rule 
And  compass  vile  :  so  that  ye  taught  a  school 
Of  dolts  to  smooth,  inlay  and  clip  and  fit ; 
Till,  like  the  certain  wands  of  Jacob's  wit, 
Their  verses  tallied.     Easy  was  the  task  : 
A  thousand  handicraftsmen  wore  the  mask 
Of  Poesy.     Ill-fated,  impious  race  ! 
That  blasphemed  the  bright  Lyrist  to  his  face, 
And  did  not  know  it, — no,  they  went  about, 
Holding  a  poor  decrepit  standard  out, 
Marked  with  most  flimsy  mottoes,  and,  in  large, 
The  name  of  one  Boileau  !  " 

This  complaint,  so  far  as  it  relates  to  the  style  of  the 
rule-ridden  eighteenth-century  poetry,  had  been  made 
before :  by  Cowper,  by  Wordsworth,  by  Coleridge.  But 
Keats,  with  his  instinct  for  beauty,  pierces  to  the  core  of 
the  matter.  It  was  because  of  Pope's  defective  sense  of 
the  beautiful  that  the  doubt  arose  whether  he  was  a  poet 
at  all.     It  was  because  of  its 

"...  forgetting  the  great  end 
Of  Poetry,  that  it  should  be  a  friend 
To  soothe  the  cares  and  lift  the  thoughts  of  man, " 

that  the  poetry  of  the  classical  school  was  so  unsatisfying. 
This  is  one  of  the  very  few  passages  of  Keats  that  are  at 
all  doctrinal*  or  polemic;    and  as  such  it  has  been  re- 

*Against  the  hundreds  of  maxims  from  Pope,  Keats  fur- 
nishes a  single  motto — the  first  line  of  "  Endymion  " — 
"A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  forever." 


n6  *A  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

peatedly  cited  by  biographers  and  essayists  and  literary 
historians.  Lowell  quotes  it,  in  his  essay  on  Dryden, 
and  adds :  "  Keats  was  the  first  resolute  and  wilful  heretic, 
the  true  founder  of  the  modern  school,  which  admits  no 
cis-Elizabethan  authority  save  Milton."  Mr.  Gosse 
quotes  it  and  says,  "  in  these  lines  he  has  admirably 
summed  up  the  conceptions  of  the  first  half  of  the  present 
century  with  regard  to  classical  poetry."  *  The  passage 
was  still  fresh  when  Byron,  in  the  letter  to  Disraeli  al- 
ready quoted  f  (March  15th,  1820),  held  it  up  to  scorn  as 
the  opinion  of  "  a  young  person  learning  to  write  poetry 
and  beginning  by  teaching  the  art.  .  .  .  The  writer  of 
this  is  a  tadpole  of  the  Lakes,  a  young  disciple  of  the 
six  or  seven  new  schools,  in  which  he  has  learned  to 
write  such  lines  and  such  sentiments  as  the  above.  He 
says  *  easy  were  the  task'  of  imitating  Pope,  or  it  may  be 
of  equalling  him,  I  presume.  I  recommend  him  to  try 
before  he  is  so  positive  on  the  subject,  and  then  compare 
what  he  will  have  then  written,  and  what  he  has  now 
written,  with  the  humblest  and  earliest  compositions  ;of 
Pope,  produced  in  years  still  more  youthful  than  those 
of  Mr.  Keats  when  he  invented  his  new  *  Essay  on  Criti- 
cism,' entitled  *  Sleep  and  Poetry '  (an  ominous  title)  from 
whence  the  above  canons  are  taken." 

In  a  manuscript  note  on  this  passage  made  after  Keats' 
death,  Byron  wrote:  "My  indignation  at  Mr.  Keats'  de- 
preciation of  Pope  has  hardly  permitted  me  to  do  justice 
to  his  own  genius.  .  .  .  He  is  a  loss  to  our  literature; 
and  the  more  so,  as  he  himself,  before  his  death,  is  said 

*"From  Shakespeare  to  Pope."    See  also  Sidney  Colvin's 
"Keats,"  New  York,  1887,  pp.  61-64. 
f  Vide  supra,  p.  70. 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  Tfante  %evtval.     117 

to  have  been  persuaded  that  he  had  not  taken  the  right 
line,  and  was  reforming  his  style  upon  the  more  classical 
models  of  the  language."  Keats  made  a  study  of  Dry- 
den's  versification  before  writing  "  Lamia  " ;  but  had  he 
lived  to  the  age  of  Methusaleh,  he  would  not  have 
"reformed  his  style"  upon  any  such  classical  models 
as  Lord  Byron  had  in  mind.  Classical  he  might 
have  become,  in  the  sense  in  which  "Hyperion"  is 
classical;  but  in  the  sense  in  which  Pope  was  class- 
ical— never.  Pope's  Homer  he  deliberately  set  aside 
for  Chapman's — 

"Yet  did  I  never  breathe  its  pure  serene 
Till  I  heard  Chapman  speak  out  loud  and  bold."  * 

Keats  had  read  Virgil,  but  seemingly  not  much  Latin 
poetry  besides,  and  he  had  no  knowledge  of  Greek.  He 
made  acquaintance  with  the  Hellenic  world  through 
classical  dictionaries  and  a  study  of  the  casts  in  the 
British  Museum.  But  his  intuitive  grasp  of  the  antique 
ideal  of  beauty  stood  him  in  as  good  stead  as  Landor's 
scholarship.  In  such  work  as  "  Hyperion  "  and  the  "  Ode 
on  a  Grecian  Urn  "  he  mediates  between  the  ancient  and 
the  modern  spirit,  from  which  Landor's  clear-cut  mar- 
bles stand  aloof  in  chill  remoteness.  As  concerns  his 
equipment,  Keats  stands  related  to  Scott  in  romance 
learning  much  as  he  does  to  Landor  in  classical  scholar- 
ship. He  was  no  antiquary,  and  naturally  made  mistakes 
of  detail.  In  his  sonnet  "On  First  Looking  into  Chap- 
man's Homer,"  he  makes  Cortez,  and  not  Balboa,  the 


*  That  he  knew  Pope' s  version  is  evident  from  a  letter  to 
Haydon  of  May,  1817,  given  in  Lord  Houghton's  "Life." 


1 1 8  cA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

discoverer  of  the  Pacific.  Apropos  pi  a  line  in  "The 
Eve  of  St.  Agnes  "— 

"  And  the  long  carpets  rose  along  the  gusty  floor  " — 

Leigh  Hunt  called  attention  to  the  fact  that  rushes  and 
not  carpets  covered  the  floors  in  the  Middle  Ages.  In 
the  same  poem,  Porphyro  sings  to  his  lute  an  ancient 
ditty, 

"In  Provence  called  '  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci.'  " 

The  ditty  was  by  Alain  Chartier,  who  was  not  a  trouba- 
dour, but  a  Norman  by  birth  and  a  French  court  poet  of 
the  fifteenth  century.  The  title,  which  Keats  found  in  a 
note  in  an  edition  of  Chaucer,  pleased  his  fancy  and  sug- 
gested his  ballad,*  of  the  same  name,  which  has  nothing 
in  common  with  Chartier's  poem.  The  latter  is  a  con- 
ventional love  estrif  in  the  artificial  taste  of  the  time. 
But  errors  of  this  sort,  which  any  encyclopaedia  can  cor- 
rect, are  perfectly  unimportant. 

Byron's  sneer  at  Keats,  as  "  a  tadpole  of  the  Lakes," 
was  ridiculously  wide  of  the  mark.  He  was  nearly  of 
the  second  generation  of  romantics;  he  was  only  three 
years  old  when  "The  Ancient  Mariner"  was  published; 
"  Christabel "  and  Scott's  metrical  romances  had  all  been 
issued  before  he  put  forth  his  first  volume.     But  though 

*  He  could  have  known  extremely  little  of  mediaeval  litera- 
ture ;  yet  there  is  nothing  anywhere,  even  in  the  far  more  in- 
structed Pre-Raphaelite  school  which  catches  up  the  whole 
of  the  true  mediaeval  romantic  spirit — the  spirit  which  ani- 
mates the  best  parts  of  the  Arthurian  legend,  and  of  the  wild 
stories  which  float  through  mediaeval  tale-telling,  and  make 
no  small  figure  in  mediaeval  theology — as  does  the  short  piece 
of  'La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci'"  (Saintsbury :  "A  Short 
History  of  English  Literature, "  p.  673). 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  T>ante  Revival.     119 

he  owes  much  to  Coleridge  *  and  more  perhaps  to  Chat- 
terton,  he  took  no  imprint  from  Wordsworth,  and  cared 
nothing  for  Scott..  Keats,  like  his  friend  Hunt,  turned 
instinctively  away  from  northern  to  southern  Gothic; 
from  rough  border  minstrelsy  to  the  mythology  and  ro- 
mance of  the  races  that  dwelt  about  the  midland  sea. 
Keats'  sensuous  nature  longed  for  "  a  beaker  full  of  the 
warm  South."  "I  have  tropical  blood  in  my  veins," 
wrote  Hunt,  deprecating  "the  criticism  of  a  Northern 
climate"  as  applied  to  his  "  Story  of  Rimini."  Keats' 
death  may  be  said  to  have  come  to  him  from  Scotland, 
not  only  by  reason  of  the  brutal  attacks  in  Blackwood's 
— to  which  there  is  some  reason  for  believing  that  Scott 
was  privy — but  because  the  hardships  and  exposure  of 
his  Scotch  tour  laid  the  foundation  of  his  fatal  malady. 
He  brought  back  no  literary  spoils  of  consequence  from 
the  North,  and  the  description  of  the  journey  in  his  letters/ 
makes  it  evident  that  his  genius  could  not  find  itself  there. 
This  uncomfortable  feeling  of  alienation  is  expressed  in 
his  "Sonnet  on  Visiting  the  Tomb  of  Burns."  The 
Scotch  landscape  seems  "cold — strange."  • 

"The  short-lived  paly  Summer  is  but  won 
From  Winter's  ague." 

And  in  the  letter  from  Dumfries,  enclosing  the  sonnet 
he  writes :  "  I  know  not  how  it  is,  the  clouds,  the  sky,  the 
houses,  all  seem  anti-Grecian  and  anti-Charlemagnish."  % 
Charlemagnisk  is  Keats'  word  for  the  true  mediaeval- 
romantic.  It  is  noteworthy  that  Keats  avoided  Scott's 
favourite  verse  forms.  "  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci " 
is  not  in  the  minstrel  ballad  measure;    and  when  Keats 

*  Vide  supra,  p.  85.     And  for  Keats'  interest  in  Chatter- 
ton  see  vol.  i.,  pp.  370-72. 


120  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

uses  the  eight-syllabled  couplet,  he  uses  it  very  differently 
from  Scott,  without  the  alternate  riming  which  prevails  in 
"The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel "  and  all  the  rest  of  the 
series. 

A  spark  from  Spenser  kindled  the  flame  of  poetry  in 
Keats.  His  friend,  Cowden  Clarke,  read  him  the  "  Epi- 
thalamium"  one  day  in  1812  in  an  arbour  in  the  old 
school  garden  at  Enfield,  and  lent  him  a  copy  of  "  The 
Faery  Queene"  to  take  home  with  him.  "He  romped 
through  the  scenes  of  the  romance,"  reports  Mr.  Clarke, 
"like  a  young  horse  turned  into  a  spring  meadow." 
There  is  something  almost  uncanny — like  the  visits  of  a 
spirit — about  these  recurrent  appearances  of  Spenser  in 
English  literary  history.  It  must  be  confessed  that  now- 
adays we  do  not  greatly  romp  through  "The  Faery 
Queene."  There  even  runs  a  story  that  a  certain  pro- 
fessor of  literature  in  an  American  college,  being  con- 
sulted about  Spenser  by  one  of  his  scholars,  exclaimed 
impatiently,  "  Oh,  damn  Spenser!  "  But  it  is  worth  while 
to  have  him  in  the  literature,  if  only  as  a  starter  for 
young  poets.  Keats'  earliest  known  verses  are  an  "Imi- 
tation of  Spenser"  in  four  stanzas.  His  allusions  to  him 
are  frequent,  and  his  fugitive  poems  include  a  "Sonnet 
to  Spenser "  and  a  number  of  "  Spenserian  Stanzas." 
But  his  only  really  important  experiment  in  the  measure 
of  "  The  Faery  Queene "  was  "  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes." 
It  was  with  fine  propriety  that  Shelley  chose  that  meas- 
ure for  his  elegy  on  Keats  in  "  Adonais."  Keats  made  a 
careful  study  of  Spenser's  verse,  the 

"Spenserian  vowels  that  elope  with  ease  " — 
and  all  the  rest  of  it.     His  own  work  in  this  kind  is 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  T)ante  ^Revival.     121 

thought  to  resemble  most  closely  the  "  Psyche  "  of  the 
Irish  poetess,  Mary  Tighe,  published  in  1805  *  on  the 
well-known  fable  of  Cupid  and  Psyche  in  Apuleius.  It 
is  inferred  that  Keats  knew  the  poem  from  a  mention  of 
the  author  in  one  of  his  pieces.  He  also  wrote  an  "  Ode 
to  Psyche,"  which  seems,  however,  to  have  been  inspired 
by  an  engraving  in  Spenser's  "  Polymetis."  Mrs.  Tighe 
was  one  of  the  latest  and  best  of  the  professed  imitators 
of  Spenser.  There  is  beauty  of  a  kind  in  her  languidly 
melodious  verse  and  over-profuse  imagery,  but  it  is  not 
the  passionate  and  quintessential  beauty  of  Keats.  She 
is  quite  incapable  of  such  choice  and  pregnant  word 
effects  as  abound  in  every  stanza  of  "  St.  Agnes  " : 

"  Unclasps  her  warmed  jewels,  one  by  one  "  : 

"Buttressed  from  moonlight "  : 

"The  music,  yearning  like  a  God  in  pain  "  : 

"The  boisterous,  midnight,  festive  clarion." 

Keats'  intimate  association  with  Leigh  Hunt,  whose 
acquaintance  he  made  in  18 16,  was  not  without  influence 
on  his  literary  development.  He  admired  the  "  Story  of 
Rimini,"  f  and  he  adopted  in  his  early  verse  epistles  and 
in  "Endymion"  (1818),  that  free  ante-Popean  treatment 
of  the  couplet  with  enjambement,  or  overflow,  double 
rimes,  etc.,  which  Hunt  had  practised  in  the  poem  itself 
and  advocated  in  the  preface.  Many  passages  in  "  Ri- 
mini "  and  in  Keats'  couplet  poems  anticipate,  in  their 
easy  flow,  the  relaxed  versification  of  "  The  Earthly  Para- 
dise."    This  was  the  Elizabethan  type  of  heroic  couplet, 

*  The  Diet.  Nat.  Biog.  mentions  doubtfully  an  earlier  edi- 
tion in  1795. 

J  See  "Sonnet  on  Leigh  Hunt's  Poem  'The  Story  of  Ri- 
mini.'"    Forman's  ed.,  vol.  ii.,  p.  229. 


122  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

and  its  extreme  instance  is  seen  in  William  Chamber- 
layne's  "Pharonnida"  (1659).  There  is  no  proof  of 
Keats'  alleged  indebtedness  to  Chamberlayne,  though 
he  is  known  to  have  been  familiar  with  another  specimen 
of  the  type,  William  Browne's  "Britannia's  Pastorals." 
Hunt  also  confirmed  Keats  in  the  love  of  Spenser, 
and  introduced  him  to  Ariosto  whom  he  learned  to 
read  in  the  Italian,  five  or  six  stanzas  at  a  time.  Dante 
he  read  in  Cary's  translation,  a  copy  of  which  was  the 
only  book  that  he  took  with  him  on  his  Scotch  trip. 
"The  fifth  canto  of  Dante,"  he  wrote  (March,  1819), 
"pleases  me  more  and  more;  it  is  that  one  in  which  he 
meets  with  Paulo  and  Francesca."  He  afterwards 
dreamed  of  the  story  and  wrote  a  sonnet  upon  his  dream, 
which  Rossetti  thought  "  by  far  the  finest  of  Keats'  son- 
nets "  next  to  that  on  Chapman's  "  Homer."  *  Mr.  J.  M. 
Robertson  thinks  that  the  influence  of  Cary's  "  Dante  "  is 
visible  in  "  Hyperion,"  especially  in  the  recast  version 
"Hyperion:  A  Vision."  f  And  Leigh  Hunt  suggests 
that  in  the  lines  in  "  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes  "— 

"The  sculptured  dead  on  each  side  seem  to  freeze, 
Emprisoned  in  black,  purgatorial  rails : 
Knights,  ladies,  praying  in  dumb  orat'ries, 
He  passeth  by  ;  and  his  weak  spirit  fails 
To  think  how  they  may  ache  in  icy  hoods  and  mails  " — 

the   germ   of  the  thought  is  in  Dante.  J     Keats  wished 

*  See  Forman's  ed.,  vol.  ii.,  p.  334. 

f"New  Essays  toward  a  Critical  Method,"    London,  1897, 
p.  256. 

%  "  Come,  per  sostentar  solaio  o  tetto, 
Per  mensola  talvolta  una  figura 
Si  vede  giunger  le  ginocchia  al  petto, 
La  qual  fa  del  non  ver  vera  rancura 
Nascere  in  chi  la  vede." 

— "  Purgatorio, "  Canto  x.,  130-34. 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  Ttante  Revival.     123 

that  Italian  might  take  the  place  of  French  in  English 
schools.  To  Hunt's  example  was  also  due,  in  part,  that 
fondness  for  neologisms  for  which  the  latter  apologises 
in  the  preface  to  "  Rimini,"  and  with  which  Keats  was 
wont  to  enrich  his  diction,  as  well  as  with  Chattertonian 
archaisms,  Chapmanese  compounds,  "taffeta  phrases, 
silken  terms  precise "  from  Elizabethan  English,  and 
coinages  like  poesied,  Jollying,  eye-earnestly — licenses  and 
affectations  which  gave  dire  offence  to  Gifford  and  the 
classicals  generally. 

In  the  1820  volume,  which  includes  Keats'  maturest 
work,  there  was  a  story  from  the  "  Decameron,"  "  Isa- 
bella, or  the  Pot  of  Basil,"  which  tells  how  a  lady  ex- 
humes the  body  of  her  murdered  lover,  cuts  off  the  head 
and  buries  it  in  a  pot  of  sweet  basil,  which  she  keeps 
in  her  chamber  and  waters  with  her  tears.  It  was  per- 
haps symptomatic  of  a  certain  morbid  sensibility  in 
Keats  to  select  this  subject  from  so  cheerful  a  writer 
as  Boccaccio.  This  intensity  of  love  surviving  in  face 
of  leprosy,  torment,  decay,  and  material  horrors  of  all 
kinds;  this  passionate  clinging  of  spirit  to  body,  is  a 
mediaeval  note,  and  is  repeated  in  the  neo-romantic* 
school  which  derives  from  Keats;  in  Rossetti,  Swin- 
burne, Morris,  O'Shaughnessy,  Marzials,  and  Paine. 
Think  of  the  unshrinking  gaze  which  Dante  fixes  upon 
the  tortures  of  the  souls  in  pain;  of  the  wasted  body 
of  Christ  upon  the  cross;  of  the  fasts,  flagellations, 
mortifications  of  penitents;  the  unwashed  friars;  the 
sufferings  of  martyrs.  Keats  apologises  for  his  en- 
deavour "to  make  old  prose  in  modern  rime  more 
sweet,"  and  for  his  departure  from  the  even,  un excited 
narrative  of  his  original : 


124  sA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

" 0  eloquent  and  famed  Boccaccio, 
Of  thee  we  now  should  ask  forgiving  boon.  .  .  . 
For  venturing  syllables  that  ill  beseem 
The  quiet  glooms  of  such  a  piteous  theme.  .  .  . 

Ah  !  wherefore  all  this  wormy  circumstance? 
Why  linger  at  the  yawning  tomb  so  long? 
O  for  the  gentleness  of  old  Romance, 
The  simple  plaining  of  the  minstrel's  song." 

But  it  is  just  this  wormy  circumstance  that  rivets  the 
poet's  attention ;  his  imagination  lingers  over  Isabella 
kissing  the  dead  face,  pointing  each  eyelash,  and  wash- 
ing away  the  loam  that  disfigures  it  with  her  tears;  over 
the  basil  tufts  growing  rankly  from  the  mouldering  head. 

"The  thing  was  vile  with  green  and  livid  spot," 

but  Keats'  tenderness  pierces  the  grave. 

It  is  instructive  to  compare  "Isabella"  with  Dryden's 
"  Sigismonda  and  Guiscardo,"  also  from  the  "  Decameron" 
and  surcharged  with  the  physically  horrible.  In  this  tale 
Tancred  sends  his  daughter  her  lover's  heart  in  a  golden 
goblet.  She  kisses  the  heart,  fills  the  cup  with  poison, 
drinks,  and  dies.  The  two  poems  are  typical  examples 
of  romantic  and  classical  handling,  though  neither  is 
quite  a  masterpiece  in  its  kind.  The  treatment  in  Dry- 
den  is  cool,  unimpassioned,  objective — like  Boccaccio's, 
in  fact.  The  story  is  firmly  told,  with  a  masculine  energy 
of  verse  and  language.  Sigismonda  and  Tancred  are 
characters,  confronted  wills,  as  in '  drama,  and  their 
speeches  are  like  tirades  from  a  tragedy  of  Racine.  But 
here  Dryden's  rhetorical  habit  and  his  fondness  for  rea- 
soning in  rime  run  away  with  him,  %and  make  his  art 
inferior  to  Boccaccio's.  Sigismonda  argues  her  case  like 
counsel  for  the  defendant.     She  even  enjoys  her  own 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  T)ante  Revival.     125 

argument  and  carries  it  out  with  a  gusto  into  abstrac- 
tions. 

"  But  leaving  that :  search  we  the  secret  springs, 
And  backward  trace  the  principles  of  things  ; 
There  shall  we  find,  that  when  the  world  began 
One  common  mass  composed  the  mould  of  man, "  etc. 

Dryden's  grossness  of  taste  mars  his  narrative  at  sev- 
eral points.  The  satirist  in  him  will  not  let  him  miss 
the  chance  for  a  sneer  at  priests  and  another  at  William 
III.'s  standing  army.  He  makes  his  heroine's  love  igno- 
bly sensual.  She  is  a  widow,  who  having  "  tasted  mar- 
riage joys,"  is  unwilling  to  live  single.  Dryden's  bour- 
geois manner  is  capable  even  of  ludicrous  descents. 

"The  sudden  bound  awaked  the  sleeping  sire, 
And  showed  a  sight  no  parent  can  desire." 

In  Keats'  poem  there  are  no  characters  dramatically 
opposed.  Lorenzo  and  Isabella  have  no  individuality 
apart  from  their  love;  passion  has  absorbed  character. 
The  tale  is  not  evolved  firmly  and  continuously,  but  with 
lyrical  outbursts,  a  poignancy  of  sympathy  at  the  points 
of  highest  tragic  tensity  and  a  swooning  sensibility  all 
through,  that  sometimes  breaks  into  weakness.  There 
can  be  no  question,  however,  which  poem  is  the  more  felt ; 
no  question,  either,  as  to  which  method  is  superior — at 
least  as  between  these  two  artists,  and  as  applied  to  sub- 
jects of  this  particular  kind. 

"  Isabella  "  is  in  ottava  rima,  "  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes  " 
in  the  Spenserian  stanza.  /jfhis  exquisite  creation  has 
all  the  insignia  of  romantic  art  and  has  them  in  a  dan- 
gerous degree.     It  is  brilliant  with  colour,  richly  ornate,* 
tremulous  with  emotion.     Only  the  fine  instinct  of  the 


126  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

artist  saved  it  from  the  overladen  decoration  and  cloying 
sweetness  of  "  Endymion,"  and  kept  it  chaste  in  its 
warmth.  As  it  is,  the  story  is  almost  too  slight  for  its 
descriptive  mantle  "rough  with  gems  and  gold."^  Such 
as  it  is,  it  is  of  Keats'  invention  and  of  the  "  Romeo  and 
Juliet"  variety  of  plot.  A  lover  who  is  at  feud  with  his 
mistress'  clan  ventures  into  his  foemen's  castle  while  a 
revel  is  going  on,  penetrates  by  the  aid  of  her  nurse  to 
his  lady's  bower,  and  carries  her  off  while  all  the  house- 
hold are  sunk  in  drunken  sleep.  All  this  in  a  night  of 
wild  weather  and  on  St.  Agnes'  Eve,  when,  according  to 
popular  belief,  maidens  might  see  their  future  husbands 
in  their  dreams,  on  the  performance  of  certain  conditions. 
The  resemblance  of  this  poem  to  "  Christabel "  at  several 
points,  has  already  been  mentioned,*  and  especially  in 
the  description  of  the  heroine's  chamber.  But  the  differ- 
ences are  even  more  apparent.  Coleridge's  art  is  tem- 
perate and  suggestive;  spiritual,  too,  with  an  unequalled 
power  of  haunting  the  mind  with  a  sense  of  ghostly  pres- 
ences. In  his  scene  the  touches  are  light  and  few;  all 
is  hurried,  mysterious,  shadowy.  But  Keats  was  a  word 
painter,  his  treatment  more  sensuous  than  Coleridge's, 
and  fuller  of  imagery.  He  lingers  over  the  figure  of  the 
maiden  disrobing,  and  over  the  furnishings  of  her  room. 
The  Catholic  elegancies  of  his  poem,  as  Hunt  called 
them,  and  the  architectural  details  are  there  for  their  own 
sake — as  pictures;  the  sculptured  dead  in  the  chapel,  the 
foot-worn  stones,  the  cobwebbed  arches,  broad  hall  pillar, 
and  dusky  galleries;  the  "little  moonlight  room,  pale, 
latticed,  chill";  the  chain-drooped  lamp: 

"The  carven  angels  ever  eager-eyed  " 
*  Vide  supra,  p.  85. 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  'Dante  Revival.     127 

that 

"Stared,  where  upon  their  heads  the  cornice  rests, 
With  hair  blown  back  and  wings  put  crosswise  on  their 
breasts. " 

Possibly  "  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci "  borrows  a  hint 
from  the  love-crazed  knight  in  Coleridge's  "  Love,"  who 
is  haunted  by  a  fiend  in  the  likeness  of  an  angel ;  but 
here  the  comparison  is  to  Keats'  advantage.  Not  even 
Coleridge  sang  more  wildly  well  than  the  singer  of  tliis 
weird  ballad  strain,  which  has  seemed  to  many  critics  * 
the  masterpiece  of  this  poet,  wherein  his  "  natural 
magic  "  reaches  its  most  fascinating  subtlety  and  purity 

expression.  f 


: 


The  famous  picture  of  the  painted  "  casement,  high  and 
riple-arched  "  in  Madeline's  chamber,  "  a  burst  of  rich- 
ness, noiseless,  coloured,  suddenly  enriching  the  moon- 
light, as  if  a  door  of  heaven  were  opened,"  f  should  be 
compared  with  Scott's  no  less  famous  description  of  the 
east  oriel  of  Melrose  Abbey  by  moonlight,  and  the  com- 
parison will  illustrate  a  distinction  similar  to  that  already 
noted  between  the  romanticism  of  Coleridge  and  Scott. 
The  latter  is  here  depicting  an  actual  spot,  one  of  the 
great  old  border  abbeys;  national  pride  and  the  pathos 
of  historic  ruins  mingle  with  the  description.  Made- 
line's castle  stood  in  the  country  of  dream;  and  it  was 
an  "  elfin  storm^  from  fairyland "  that  came  to  aid  the 

*  Rossetti,  Colvin,  Gates,  Robertson,  Forman ,  and  others, 
f  Leigh  Hunt.     It  has  been  objected  to  this  passage  that 
moonlight  is  not  strong  enough  to  transmit  colored  rays,  like 
sunshine  (see  Colvin's  "Keats,"  p.  160).     But  the  mistake — 
if  it  is  one — is  shared  by  Scott. 

"The  moonbeam  kissed  the  holy  pane 
And  threw  on  the  pavement  a  bloody  stain." 

— "Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,"  Canto  ii,  xi. 


128  c//  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

lovers'  flight,*  and  all  the  creatures  of  his  tale  are  but 

the 

"Shadows  haunting  fairily 
The  brain  new  stuffed  in  youth  with  triumphs  gay 
Of  old  Romance. " 


In  Keats  is  the  romantic  escape,  the  longing  to 

"leave  the  world  unseen, 
And  with  thee  fade  away  into  the  forest  dim."f 

Keats  cared  no  more  for  history  than  he  did  for  con- 
temporary politics.  Courthope  %  quotes  a  passage  from 
"  Endymion  "  to  illustrate  his  indifference  to  everything 
but  art : 

"  Hence,  pageant  history  !     Hence,  gilded  cheat !  .  .  . 
Many  old  rotten-timbered  boats  there  be 
Upon  thy  vaporous  bosom,  magnified 
To  goodly  vessels  ;  many  a  sail  of  pride, 
And  golden-keeled,  is  left  unlaunched  and  dry. 
But  wherefore  this?     What  care,  though  owl  did  fly 
About  the  great  Athenian  admiral's  mast? 
What  care  though  striding  Alexander  past 
The  Indus  with  his  Macedonian  numbers? 

.  .  .  Juliet  leaning 
Amid  her  window-flowers, — sighing, — weaning 
Tenderly  her  fancy  from  its  maiden  snow, 
Doth  more  avail  than  these :  the  silver  flow 
Of  Hero's  tears,  the  swoon  of  Imogen, 
Fair  Pastorella  in  the  bandit's  den, 
Are  things  to  brood  on  with  more  ardency 
Than  the  death-day  of  empires." 

*  It  is  interesting  to  learn  that  the  line 

"For  o'er  the  Southern  moors 
I  have  a  home  for  thee  " 

read  in  the  original  draught  "  Over  the  bleak  Dartmoor, "  etc. 
Dartmoor  was  in  sight  of  Teignmouth  where  Keats  once 
spent  two  months  ;  but  he  cancelled  the  local  allusion  in  obe- 
dience to  a  correct  instinct. 

f  "  Ode  to  a  Nightingale." 

j"The   Liberal   Movement  in    English   Literature,"  Lon-~ 
don,  1885,  p.  181. 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  the  *Dante  Revival.     1 29 

This  passage  should  be  set  beside  the  complaint  in 
"  Lamia  "  of  the  disenchanting  touch  of  science : 

"There  was  an  awful  rainbow  once  in  heaven,"  etc. 

[Keats  is  the  poet  of  romantic  emotion,  as  Scott  of  ro- 
mantic action.]  Professor  Gates  says  that  Keats'  heroes 
never  do  anything.*  It  puzzles  the  reader  of  "The  Eve 
of  St.  Agnes"  to  know  just  why  Porphyro  sets  out  the 
feast  of  cates  on  the  little  table  by  Madeline's  bedside? 
unless  it  be  to  give  the  poet  an  opportunity  for  his  lus- 
cious description  of  "the  lucent  syrups  tinct  with  cinna- 
mon "  and  other  like  delicacies.  In  the  early  fragment 
"  Calidore."  the  hero — who  gets  his  name  from  Spenser 
— does  nothing  in  some  hundred  and  fifty  lines  but  assist 
two  ladies  to  dismount  from  their  palfreys.  To  revert,  es 
before,  to  Ariosto's  programme,  it  was  not  the  arme  and 
andaci  imprese  which  Keats  sang,  but  the  donne,  the 
amori,  and  the  cortesie.  Feudal  war  array  was  no  con- 
cern of  his,  but  the  "  argent  revelry "  of  masque  and 
dance,  and  the  "  silver-snarling  trumpets "  in  the  musi- 
cians' gallery.  He  was  the  poet  of  the  lute  and  the 
nightingale,  rather  than  of  the  shock  of  spear  in  tourney 
and  crusade.  His  "  Specimen  of  an  Induction  to  a 
Poem  "  begins 

"  Lo  !  I  must  tell  a  tale  of  chivalry.'* 

But  he  never  tells  it.  The  piece  evaporates  in  visions  of 
pure  loveliness;  " large  white  plumes " ;  sweet  ladies  on 
the  worn  tops  of  old  battlements;  light-footed  damsels 
standing  in  sixes  and  sevens  about  the  hall  in  courtly 
talk.     Meanwhile  the  lance  is  resting  against  the  wall. 

*" Studies  and  Appreciations."  Lewis  G.Gates.  New 
York,  1890,  p.  17. 


130  <iA  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

"Ah  !  shall  I  ever  tell  its  cruelty, 
When  the  fire  flashes  from  a  warrior's  eye, 
And  his  tremendous  hand  is  grasping  it?  " 

"No,"  answers  the  reader,  "I  don't  think  you  ever 
will.  Leave  that  sort  of  thing  to  Walter  Scott,  and  go 
on  and  finish  your  charming  fragment  of  'The  Eve  of  St. 
Mark/  which  stops  provokingly  just  where  Bertha  was 
reading  the  illuminated  manuscript,  as  she  sat  in  her 
room  of  an  April  evening,  when 

1  On  the  western  window  panes, 
The  chilly  sunset  faintly  told 
Of  unmatured  green  valleys  cold. '  "  * 

This  quaintly  attractive  fragment  of  Keats  was  written  • 
while  he  was  living  in  the  old  cathedral  and  college  city  ■ 
of  Winchester.  "  Some  time  since,"  he  writes  to  his 
brother  George,  September,  18 19,  "I  began  a  poem  called 
1  The  Eve  of  St.  Mark,'  quite  in  the  spirit  of  town  quietude. 
I  think  it  will  give  you  the  sensation  of  walking  about  an 
old  country  town  in  a  coolish  evening."  The  letter  de- 
scribes the  maiden-lady-like  air  of  the  side  streets,  with 
doorsteps  fresh  from  the  flannel,  the  doors  themselves 
black,  with  small  brass  handles  and  lion's  head  or  ram's 
head  knockers,  seldom  disturbed.  He  speaks  of  his 
walks  through  the  cathedral  yard  and  two  college-like 
squares,  grassy  and  shady,  dwelling-places  of  deans  and 
prebendaries,  out  to  St.  Cross  Meadows  with  their  Gothic 
tower  and  Alms  Square.  Mr.  Colvin  thinks  that  Keats 
"in  this  piece  anticipates  in  a  remarkable  degree  the 
feeling  and  method  of  the  modern  pre-Raphaelite 
schools  " ;    and  that  it  is  "  perfectly  in  the  spirit  of  Ros~ 

*  See  vol.  i.,  p.  371,    and  for  Cumberland's  poem,  on  the 
same  superstition,  ibid.,  177. 


Keats,  Leigh  Hunt,  and  theTfante  Revival.      1*31 

setti  (whom  we  know  that  the  fragment  deeply  impressed 
and  interested)."  Mr.  Forman,  indeed,  quotes  Rossetti's 
own  dictum  (works  of  John  Keats,  vol.  ii.,  p.  320)  that 
the  poem  "shows  astonishingly  real  mediaevalism  for  one 
not  bred  as  an  artist." 

It  is  in  the  Pre-Raphaelites  that  Keats'  influence  on 
our  later  poetry  is  seen  in  its  most  concentrated  shape. 
But  it  is  traceable  in  Tennyson,  in  Hood,  in  the  Brown- 
ings, and  in  many  others,  where  his  name  is  by  no  means 
written  in  water.  "Wordsworth,"  says  Lowell,  "has  in- 
fluenced most  the  ideas  of  succeeding  poets ;  Keats  their 
forms." 


CHAPTER   IV. 

Gbe  IRomanttc  Scbool  in  German^.* 

Cross-fertilization,  at  least  in  these  modern  eras,  is 
as  necessary  in  the  life  of  a  literature  as  in  that  of  an 
animal  or  a  plant.  English  romanticism,  though  it 
started  independently,  did  not  remain  an  isolated  phe- 

•  Besides  the  authorities  quoted  or  referred  to  in  the  text, 
the  materials  used  in  this  chapter  are  drawn  mainly  from  the 
standard  histories  of  German  literature ;  especially  from 
Georg  Brandes'  "  Hauptstromungen  in  der  Litteratur  des 
Neunzehnten  Jahrhunderts "  (1872-76);  Julian  Schmidt's 
"  Geschichte  der  Deutschen  Litteratur  "  (Berlin,  1890)  ;  H.  J. 
T.  Hettner's  "  Litteraturgeschichte"  (Braunschweig,  1872)  ; 
Wilhelm  Scherer's  "History  of  German  Literature"  (Cony- 
beare's  translation,  New  York,  1886)  ;  Karl  Hillebrand's 
"German  Thought"  (trans.,  New  York,  1880)  ;  Vogt  und 
Koch's  "Geschichte  der  Deutschen  Litteratur"  (Leipzig  and 
Wien,  1897).  My  own  reading  in  the  German  romantics 
is  by  no  means  extensive.  I  have  read,  however,  a  number 
of  Tieck's  "Marchen"  and  of  Fouque's  romances;  Novalis' 
"Hymns  to  the  Night"  and  "Heinrich  von  Ofterdingen"  ;  A. 
W.  Schlegel's  "Lectures  on  Dramatic  Literature"  and  F. 
Schlegel' s  "  Lucinde  "  ;  all  of  Uhland's  ballads  and  most  of 
Heine's  writings  in  verse  and  prose;  a  large  part  of  "Des 
Knaben  Wunderhorn,"  and  the  selections  from  Achim  von 
Arnim,  Clemens  Brentano,  and  Joseph  Gorres  contained  in 
Koch's  "Deutsche  National  Litteratur,"  146  Band  (Stuttgart, 
1891).  These  last  include  Brentano's  "Die  Erfindung  des 
Rosenkranzes, "  "  Kasperl  und  Annerl,"  "  Gockel  und  Hinkerl, " 
etc.,  and  Arnim's  " Kronenwachter, "  a  scen^from  "Die  Pap- 
stin  Johanna,"  etc.  I  have,  of  course,  read  Madame  de 
Stael's  "L'Allemagne  "  ;  all  of  Carlyle' s  papers  on  German 
literature,  with  his  translations ;  the  Grimm  fairy  tales  and 
the  like. 

132 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  133 

nomenon ;  it  was  related  to  the  general  literary  move- 
ment in  Europe.  Even  Italy  had  its  romantic  movement ; 
Manzoni  began,  like  Walter  Scott,  by  translating  Burger's 
"Lenore"  and  "Wild  Huntsman";  and  afterwards,  like 
Schlegel  in  Germany  and  Hugo  in  France,  attacked  the 
classical  entrenchments  in  his  "  Discourse  of  the  Three 
Unities."  It  is  no  part  of  our  undertaking  to  write  the 
history  of  the  romantic  schools  in  Germany  and  France. 
But  in  each  of  those  countries  the  movement  had  points 
of  likeness  and  unlikeness  which  shed  light  upon  our 
own ;  and  an  outline  sketch  of  the  German  and  French 
schools  will  help  the  reader  better  to  understand  both 
what  English  romanticism  was,  and  what  it  was  not. 

In  Germany,  as  in  England,  during  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, the  history  of  romanticism  is  a  history  of  arrested 
development.  Romanticism  existed  in  solution,  but  was 
not  precipitated  and  crystallised  until  the  closing  years 
of  the  period.  The  current  set  flowing  by  Burger's  bal- 
lads and  Goethe's  "Gotz,"  was  met  and  checked  by  a 
counter-current,  the  new  enthusiasm  for  the  antique  pro- 
moted by  Winckelmann's  *  works  on  classic  art,  by  the 
neo-paganism  of  Goethe's  later  writings,  and  by  the  in- 
fluence of  Lessing's  f  clear,  rationalising,  and  thoroughly 
Protestant  spirit.  J 

We  may  note,  at  the  outset,  the  main  features  in  which 
the  German  romanticism  differed  from  the  English. 
First,  then,  it  was  more  definitely  a  movement.  It  was 
organised,  self-conscious,  and  critical.     Indeed,  it  was 

*"  Gedanken  iiber.  die  Nachahmung  der  Griechischen  Werke 
in  der  Malerei  una*  Bildhauerkunst,"  1755.  "  Geschichte  der 
Kunst  des  Alterthums, "  1764. 

f  "Laocoon,"  1766. 

%  See  vol.  i.,  chap.  xi. ;  and  particularly  pp.  383-87. 


134  *d  History  of  English  %pmanticism. 

in  criticism  and  not  in  creative  literature  that  its  highest 
successes  were  won.  Coleridge,  Scott,  and  Keats,  like 
their  English  forerunners  in  the  eighteenth  century,* 
worked  independently  of  one  another.  They  did  not 
conspire  to  a  common  end;  had  little  personal  contact — 
were  hardly  acquaintances,  and  in  no  sense  a  "  school." 
But  the  German  romanticists  constituted  a  compact  group 
with  coherent  aims.  They  were  intimate  friends  and  as- 
sociates; travelled,  lived,  and  worked  together;  edited 
each  other's  books  and  married  each  other's  sisters.f 
They  had  a  theory  of  art,  a  programme,  and  a  propa- 
ganda; were  aggressive  and  polemical,  attacking  their 
adversaries  in  reviews,  and  in  satirical  tales,!  poems, 
and  plays.  Their  headquarters  were  at  Jena,  "  the  cen- 
tral point,"  says  Heine,  "  from  which  the  new  aesthetic 
dogma  radiated.  I  advisedly  say  dogma,  for  this  school 
began  with  a  criticism  of  the  art  productions  of  the  past, 
and  with  recipes  for  the  art  works  of  the  future."  Their 
organ  was  the  Athenceum,  established  by  Friedrich  Schle- 
gel  at  Berlin  in  1798,  the  date  of  Wordsworth's  and  Cole- 
ridge's "Lyrical  Ballads,"  and  the  climacteric  year  of 
English  and  German  romanticism. 

The  first  number  of  the  Athenceum  contained  the  mani- 
festo of  the  new  school,  written  by  Friedrich  Schlegel, 
the  seminal  mind  of  the  coterie.  The  terms  of  this  pro- 
nunciamento  are  somewhat  rapt  and  transcendental ;  but 
through  its  mist  of  verbiage,  one  discerns  that  the  ideal 

*  See  vol.  i.,  pp.  422-23. 

f  Novalis'  and  Wackenroder's  remains  were  edited  by  Tieck 
and  F.  Schlegel.  Arnim  married  Brentano'  s  sister  Bettina — 
Goethe's  Bettina. 

%E.g.,  Tieck' s  "Der  Gestiefelte  Kater,"  against  Nicolai 
and  the  Aufkldrung. 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  135 

of  romantic  art  is  announced  to  be :  beauty  for  beauty's 
sake,  the  union  of  poetry  and  life,  and  the  absolute  free- 
dom of  the  artist  to  express  himself.  "  Romantic  poetry," 
says  Schlegel  — M  and,  in  a  certain  sense,  all  poetry  ought 
to  be  romantic — should,  in  representing  outward  objects, 
also  represent  itself."  There  is  nothing  here  to  indicate 
the  precise  line  which  German  romantic  poetry  was  to 
take;  but  there  is  the  same  rejection  of  authority,  the 
same  assertion  of  the  right  of  original  genius  to  break  a 
path  for  itself,  which  was  made,  in  their  various  ways,  by 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  in  the  "  Lyrical  Ballads,"  by 
Keats  in  "  Sleep  and  Poetry,"  and  by  Victor  Hugo  in 
the  preface  to  "  Cromwell." 

A  second  respect  in  which  German  romanticism  differed 
from  English  was  in  its  thoroughgoing  character.  It  is 
the  disposition  of  the  German  mind  to  synthesise  thought 
and  life,  to  carry  out  theory  into  practice.  Each  of  those 
imposing  systems  of  philosophy,  Kant's,  Fichte's,  Schel- 
ling's,  Hegel's,  has  its  own  cesthetik  as  well  as  its  own 
ethik.  It  seeks  to  interpret  all  human  activities  from  a 
central  principle;  to  apply  its  highest  abstractions  to 
literature,  government,  religion,  the  fine  arts,  and  society. 
The  English  mind  is  practical  rather  than  theoretical. 
It  is  sensible,  cautious,  and  willing  to  compromise;  dis- 
trusting alike  the  logical  habit  of  the  French  to  push  out 
premises  into  conclusions  at  all  hazards;  and  the  Ger- 
man habit  of  system-building.  The  Englishman  has  no 
system;  he  has  his  whim,  and  is  careless  of  consistency. 
It  is  quite  possible  for  him  to  have  an  aesthetic  liking 
for  the  Middle  Ages,  without  wishing  to  restore  them  as 
an  actual  state  of  society.  It  is  hard  for  an  Englishman 
to  understand  to  what  degree  a  literary  man,  like  Schiller, 


136  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

was  influenced  in  his  writings  by  the  critical  philosophy 
of  Kant;  or  how  Schelling's  transcendental  idealism  was 
used  to  support  Catholicism,  and  Hegel  made  a  prop  to 
Protestant  orthodoxy  and  Junkerism.  "Tragedies  and 
romances,"  wrote  Mme.  de  Stael,  "  have  more  importance 
in  Germany  than  in  any  other  country.  They  take  them 
seriously  there;  and  to  read  such  and  such  a  book,  or 
see  such  and  such  a  play,  has  an  influence  on  the  destiny 
and  the  life.  What  they  admire  as  art,  they  wish  to  in- 
troduce into  real  life;  and  poetry,  philosophy,  the  ideal, 
in  short,  have  often  an  even  greater  empire  over  the  Ger- 
mans than  nature  and  the  passions."  In  proof  of  this, 
she  adduces  the  number  of  young  Germans  who  com- 
mitted suicide  in  consequence  of  reading  "Werther"; 
or  took  to  highway  robbery  in  emulation  of  "Die  Rau- 
her." 

I  In  England,  accordingly,  romanticism  was  a  merely 
literary  revolution  and  kept  strictly  within  the  domain  of 
art.  Scott's  political  conservatism  was  indeed,  as  we 
have  seen,  not  unrelated  to  his  antiquarianism  and  his 
fondness  for  the  feudal  past;  but  he  remained  a  Protes- 
tant Tory.  And  as  to  his  Jacobitism,  if  a  Stuart  pre- 
tender had  appeared  in  Scotland  in  18 15,  we  may  be 
sure  that  the  canny  Scott  would  not  have  taken  arms  in 
his  behalf  against  the  Hanoverian  king)  Coleridge's 
reactionary  politics  had  nothing  to  do  with  his  roman- 
ticism; though  it  would  perhaps  be  going  too  far  to  deny 
that  his  reverence  for  what  was  old  and  tested  by  time 
in  the  English  church  and  constitution  may  have  had  its 
root  in  the  same  temper  of  mind  which  led  him  to  com- 
pose archaic  ballad-romances  like  "  Christabel "  and 
"  The  Dark  Ladye."     But  in  Germany  "  throne  and  altar  " 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  137 

became  the  shibboleth  of  the  school ;  half  of  the  roman- 
ticists joined  the  Catholic  Church,  and  the  new  litera- 
ture rallied  to  the  side  of  aristocracy  and  privilege. 

A  third  respect  in  which  the  German  movement  differed 
from  the  English  is  partly  implied  in  what  has  been  said 
above.  In  Germany  the  romantic  revival  was  contempo- 
raneous with  a  great  philosophical  development  which 
influenced  profoundly  even  the  lighter  literature  of  the 
time.  Hence  the  mysticism  which  is  found  in  the  work 
of  many  of  the  romanticists,  and  particularly  in  the  writ- 
ings of  Novalis.  Novalis  was  a  disciple  of  Schelling, 
and  Schelling  the  continuator  of  Fichte.  Fichte's  "Wis- 
senschaftslehre  "  (1794)  is  the  philosophical  corner-stone 
of  the  German  romantic  school.  The  freedom  of  the 
fancy  from  the  thraldom  of  the  actual  world ;  the  right  of 
the  Ego  to  assert  itself  fully ;  the  principle  formulated 
by  Friedrich  Schlegel,  that  "  the  caprice  of  the  poet  knows 
no  law";  all  these  literary  doctrines  were  corollaries  of 
Fichte's  objective  idealism.*  It  is  needless  to  say  that, 
while  romantic  art  usually  partakes  of  the  mysterious,  there 


*  As  to  the  much-discussed  romantic  irony,  the  theory  of 
which  played  a  part  in  the  German  movement  corresponding 
somewhat  to  Hugo's  doctrine  of  the  grotesque,  it  seems  to 
have  made  no  impression  in  England.  I  can  discover  no 
mention  of  it  in  Coleridge.  Carlyle,  in  the  first  of  his  two 
essays  on  Richter  (1827),  expressly  distinguishes  true  humour 
from  irony,  which  he  describes  as  a  faculty  of  caricature, 
consisting  "chiefly  in  a  certain  superficial  distortion  or  rever- 
sal of  objects  "—the  method  of  Swift  or  Voltaire.  That  is, 
Carlyle  uses  irony  in  the  common  English  sense  ;  the  Socratic 
irony,  the  irony  of  the  "Modest  Proposal."  The  earliest  at- 
tempt that  I  have  encountered  to  interpret  to  the  English 
public  what  Tieck  and  the  Schlegels  meant  by  "irony  "  is  an 
article  in  Blackwood's  for  September,  1835,  on  "The  Modern 
German  School  of  Irony  " ;  but  its  analysis  is  not  very  einge- 
hend. 


138  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

is  nothing  of  this  philosophical  or  transcendental  mys- 
ticism in  the  English  romanticists.  If  we  were  to  expect 
it  anywhere  it  would  be  in  Coleridge,  who  became  the 
mediator  between  German  and  English  thought.  But 
Coleridge's  poetry  was  mainly  written  before  he  visited 
Germany  and  made  acquaintance  with  the  systems  of 
Kant  and  Schelling;  and  in  proportion  as  his  specula- 
tive activity  increased,  his  creative  force  declined.  There 
is  enough  of  the  marvellous  and  the  unexplained  in 
" Christabel,"  and  "The  Ancient  Mariner";  but  the 
"  mystic  ruby  "  and  the  "  blue  flower  "  of  the  Teutonic 
symbolists  are  not  there. 

The  German  romantic  school,  in  the  limited  and  pre- 
cise sense  of  the  term,  consisted  of  the  brothers  August 
Wilhelm  and  Friedrich  Schlegel,  Ludwig  Tieck,  Fried- 
rich  von  Hardenberg  (Novalis),  Johann  Dietrich  Gries, 
Tieck's  friend  Wackenroder,  and — at  a  distance — 
Zacharias  Werner,  the  dramatist;  besides  a  few  others, 
their  associates  or  disciples,  whose  names  need  not  here 
be  mentioned.  These  were,  as  has  been  said,  personal 
friends;  they  began  to  be  heard  of  about  1795  ;  and  their 
quarters  were  at  Jena  and  Berlin.  A  later  or  younger  group 
(Spatromantiker)  gathered  in  1808  about  the  Zeitung fur 
Einsiedler,  published  at  Heidelberg.  These  were  Clem- 
ens Brentano,  Achim  von  Arnim,  Ludwig  Uhland,  Joseph 
Gorres,  and  the  brothers  Jacob  and  Wilhelm  Grimm. 
Arnim,  Brentano,  and  Gorres  were  residing  at  the  time  at 
Heidelberg;  the  others  contributed  from  a  distance. 
Arnim  edited  the  Einsiedler ;  Gorres  was  teaching  in  the 
university.  There  were,  of  course,  many  other  adherents 
of  the  school,  working  individually  at  different  times^and 
places,  scattered  indeed  all  over  Germany,  and  of /arious 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  139 

degrees  of  importance  or  unimportance,  of  whom  I  need 
mention  only  Friedrich  de  la  Motte  Fouque,  the  popular 
novelist  and  author  of  "  Undine." 

The  history  of  German  romanticism  has  been  repeat- 
edly told.  There  are  exhaustive  treatments  of  the  sub- 
ject by  Julian  Schmidt,  Koberstein,  Hettner  ("  Die  Ro- 
mantische  Schule,"  Braunschweig,  1850);  Haym  ("Die 
Romantische  Schule,"  Berlin,  1870);  by  the  Danish 
critic,  Georg  Brandes  ("  Den  Romantiske  Skole  i  Tydsk- 
land  ").  But  the  most  famous  review  of  this  passage  of 
literary  history  is  the  poet  Heine's  brilliant  little  book, 
"  Die  Romantische  Schule,"  *  published  at  Paris  in  1833. 
This  was  written  as  a  kind  of  supplement  to  Mme.  de 
StaeTs  "  L'Allemagne  "  (1813),  and  was  intended  to  in- 
struct the  French  public  as  to  some  misunderstandings 
in  Mme.  de  StaeTs  book,  and  to  explain  what  German 
romanticism  really  was.  Professor  Boyesen  cautions  us 
to  be  on  our  guard  against  the  injustice  and  untrustworth- 
iness  of  Heine's  report.  The  warning  is  perhaps  not 
needed,  for  the  animus  of  his  book  is  sufficiently  obvious. 
Heine  had  begun  as  a  romantic  poet,  but  he  had  parted 
company  with  the  romanticists  because  of  the  reactionary 
direction  which  the  movement  took.  He  had  felt  the 
spell,  and  he  renders  it  with  wonderful  vividness  in  his 
history  of  the  school.  But,  at  the  same  time,  the  impa- 
tience of  the  political  radical  and  the  religious  sceptic — 
the  "  valiant  soldier  in  the  war  for  liberty  " — and  the 
bitterness  of  the  exile  for  opinion's  sake,  make  them- 


*  An  English  translation  was  published  in  this  country  in 
1882.  See  also  H.  H.  Boyesen' s  "Essays  on  German  Litera- 
ture" (1892)  for  three  papers  on  the  "Romantic  School  in 
Germany." 


i4-o  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

selves  felt.  His  sparkling  and  malicious  wit  turns  the 
whole  literature  of  romanticism  into  sport;  and  his  abuse 
of  his  former  teacher,  A.  W.  Schlegel,  is  personal  and 
coarse  beyond  description.  Twenty  years  ago,  he  said, 
when  he  was  a  lad,  what  overflowing  enthusiasm  he  would 
have  lavished  upon  Uhland !  He  used  to  sit  on  the  ruins 
of  the  old  castle  at  Diisseldorf  declaiming  Uhland's  poem 

"A  wandering  shepherd  young  and  fair 
Beneath  the  royal  castle  strayed. " 

"But  so  much  has  happened  since  then!  What  then 
seemed  to  me  so  grand;  all  that  chivalry  and  Catholi- 
cism; those  cavaliers  that  hack  and  hew  at  each  other  in 
knightly  tournaments;  those  gentle  squires  and  virtuous 
dames  of  high  degree;  the  Norseland  heroes  and  minne- 
singers; the  monks  and  nuns;  ancestral  tombs  thrilling 
with  prophetic  powers ;  colourless  passion,  dignified  by  the 
high-sounding  title  of  renunciation,  and  set  to  the  ac- 
companiment of  tolling  bells;  a  ceaseless  whining  of  the 
*  Miserere';  how  distasteful  all  that  has  become  tome 
since  then !  "  And — of  Fouque's  romances — "  But  our 
age  turns  away  from  all  fairy  pictures,  no  matter  how 
beautiful.  .  .  .  This  reactionary  tendency,  this  continual 
praise  of  the  nobility,  this  incessant  glorification  of  the 
feudal  system,  this  everlasting  knight-errantry  balderdash 
.  .  .  this  everlasting  sing-song  of  armours,  battle-steeds, 
high-born  virgins,  honest  guild-masters,  dwarfs,  squires, 
castles,  chapels,  minnesingers,  faith,  and  whatever  else 
that  rubbish  of  the  Middle  Ages  may  be  called,  wearied 
us." 

It  is  a  part  of  the  irony  of  things  that  this  satirist  of 
romance  should  have  been  precisely  the  one  to  compose 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  141 

the  most  popular  of  all  romantic  ballads;  and  that  the 
most  current  of  all  his  songs  should  have  been  the  one  in 
which  he  sings  of  the  enchantress  of  the  Rhine, 

"Ich  weiss  nicht  was  soil  es  bedeuten 
Dass  Ich  so  traurig  bin." 

The  "  Loreley  "  is  translated  into  many  tongues,  and  is 
sung  everywhere.  In  Germany  it  is  a  really  national 
song.  And  yet  the  tale  on  which  it  is  founded  is  not 
an  ancient  folk  legend — "  ein  Mahrchen  aus  alten  Zeiten  " 
— but  a  modern  invention  of  Clemens  Brentano,  who  first 
published  it  in  1802  in  the  form  of  a  ballad  inserted  in 
one  of  his  novels : 

44  Zu  Bacharach  am  Rheine 
Wohnt'  eine  Zanberin : 
Sie  war  so  schon  und  feine 
Und  riss  viel  Herzen  hin." 

A  certain  forgotten  romanticist,  Graf  Loeben,  made  a 
lyrical  tale  out  of  it  in  182 1,  and  Heine  composed  his 
ballad  in  1824,  afterwards  set  to  the  mournful  air  in 
which  it  is  now  universally  familiar. 

It  has  been  mentioned  that  Heine's  "Romantische 
Schule"  was  a  sort  of  continuation  and  correction  of 
Mme.  de  StaePs  "  L'Allemagne."  That  very  celebrated 
book  was  the  result  of  the  distinguished  lady's  residence 
in  Germany,  and  of  her  determination  to  reveal  Germany 
to  France.  It  has  been  compared  in  its  purpose  to  the 
"  Germania  "  of  Tacitus,  in  which  the  historian  held  up 
the  primitive  virtues  of  the  Teutonic  race  as  a  lesson  and 
a  warning  to  corrupt  Rome.  Mme.  de  Stael  had  arranged 
to  publish  her  book  in  18 10,  and  the  first  impression  of 
ten  thousand  copies  had  already  been  printed,  when  the 


142  z/?  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

whole  edition  was  seized  and  destroyed  by  the  police, 
and  the  author  was  ordered  to  quit  France  within  twenty- 
four  hours.  All  this,  of  course,  was  at  the  instance  of 
Napoleon,  who  was  by  no  means  above  resenting  the 
hostility  of  a  lady  author.  But  the  Minister  of  Police, 
General  Savary,  assumed  the  responsibility  of  the  affair; 
and  to  Mme.  de  StaeTs  remonstrance  he  wrote  in  reply : 
"  It  appeared  to  me  that  the  air  of  this  country  did  not 
agree  with  you,  and  we  are  not  yet  reduced  to  seek  for 
models  amongst  the  people  you  admire  [the  Germans]. 
Your  last  work  is  not  French."  It  was  not,  accordingly, 
until  1813  that  Mme.  de  StaeTs  suppressed  work  on  Ger- 
many saw  the  light. 

The  only  passages  in  it  that  need  engage  our  attention 
are  those  in  which  the  author  endeavours  to  interpret  to 
a  classical  people  the  literature  of  a  Gothic  race.  In 
her  chapter  entitled  "  Of  Classic  and  Romantic  Poetry," 
she  says :  "  The  word  romantic  has  been  lately  introduced 
in  Germany  to  designate  that  kind  of  poetry  which  is  de- 
rived from  the  songs  of  the  troubadours ;  that  which  owes 
its  birth  to  the  union  of  chivalry  and  Christianity."  She 
mentions  the  comparison — evidently  derived  from  Schle- 
gel's  lectures  which  she  had  attended — of  ancient  poetry 
to  sculpture  and  modern  to  painting;  explains  that  the 
French  incline  towards  classic  poetry,  and  the  English — 
"  the  most  illustrious  of  the  Germanic  nations  " — towards 
"that  which  owes  its  birth  to  chivalry  and  romance." 
"The  English  poets  of  our  times,  without  entering  into 
concert  with  the  Germans,  have  adopted  the  same  system. 
Didactic  poetry  has  given  place  to  the  fictions  of  the  Mid- 
dle Ages."  She  observes  that  simplicity  and  definite- 
ness,  that  a  certain  corporeality  and  externality — or  what 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  143 

in  modern  critical  dialect  we  would  call  objectivity — are 
notes  of  antique  art;  while  variety  and  shading  of  colour, 
and  a  habit  of  self-reflection  developed  by  Christianity 
[subjectivity],  are  the  marks  of  modern  art.  "  Simplicity 
in  the  arts  would,  among  the  moderns,  easily  degenerate 
into  coldness  and  abstraction,  while  that  of  the  ancients 
was  full  of  life  and  animation.  Honour  and  love,  valour 
and  pity,  were  the  sentiments  which  distinguished  the 
Christianity  of  chivalrous  ages;  and  those  dispositions  of 
the  soul  could  only  be  displayed  by  dangers,  exploits, 
love,  misfortunes — that  romantic  interest,  in  short,  by 
which  pictures  are  incessantly  varied."  Mme.  de  StaeTs 
analysis  here  does  not  go  very  deep,  and  her  expression 
is  lacking  in  precision ;  but  her  meaning  will  be  obvious 
to  those  who  have  well  considered  the  various  definitions 
and  expositions  of  these  contrasted  terms  with  which  we 
set  out.  Without  deciding  between  the  comparative  mer- 
its of  modern  classic  and  romantic  work,  Mme.  de  Stael 
points  out  that  the  former  must  necessarily  be  imitative. 
"  The  literature  of  the  ancients  is,  among  the  moderns,  a 
transplanted  literature;  that  of  chivalry  and  romance  is 
indigenous.  .  .  .  The  literature  of  romance  is  alone  capa- 
ble of  further  improvement,  because,  being  rooted  in  our 
own  soil,  that  alone  can  continue  to  grow  and  acquire 
fresh  life;  it  expresses  our  religion;  it  recalls  our  his- 
tory." Hence  she  notes  the  fact  that  while  the  Spaniards 
of  all  classes  know  by  heart  the  verses  of  Calderon; 
while  Shakspere  is  a  popular  and  national  poet  among 
the  English ;  and  the  ballads  of  Goethe  and  Burger  are  / 
set  to  music  and  sung  all  over  Germany;  the  French 
classical  poets  are  quite  unknown  to  the  common  people, 
u  because  the  arts  in  France  are  not,  as  elsewhere,  natives 


144  ^  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

of  the  very  country  in  which  their  beauties  are  displayed." 
In  her  review  of  German  poetry  she  gives  a  brief  descrip- 
tion, among  other  things,  of  the  "  Nibelungen  Lied,"  and 
a  long  analysis  of  Burger's  "Leonora"  and  "Wilde 
Jager  "  She  says  that  there  are  four  English  translations 
of  "  Leonora,"  of  which  William  Spenser's  is  the  best. 
"The  analogy  between  the  English  and  German  allows  a 
complete  transfusion  of  the  originality  of  style  and  versi- 
fication of  Burger.  ...  It  would  be  difficult  to  obtain 
the  same  result  in  French,  where  nothing  strange  or  odd 
seems  natural."  She  points  out  that  terror  is  "an  in- 
exhaustible source  of  poetical  effect  in  Germany.  .  .  . 
Stories  of  apparitions  and  sorcerers  are  equally  well  re- 
ceived by  the  populace  and  by  men  of  more  enlightened 
minds."  She  notes  the  fondness  of  the  new  school  for 
Gothic  architecture,  and  describes  the  principles  of 
Schlegelian  criticism.  She  transcribes  A.  W.  Schlegel's 
praises  of  the  ages  of  faith  and  the  generous  brotherhood 
of  chivalry,  and  his  lament  that  "the  noble  energy  of 
ancient  times  is  lost,"  and  that  "our  times  alas!  no 
longer  know  either  faith  or  love."  The  German  critics 
affirm  that  the  best  traits  of  the  French  character  were 
effaced  during  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV. ;  that  "  literature, 
in  ages  which  are  called  classical,  loses  in  originality 
what  it  gains  in  correctness  " ;  that  the  French  tragedies 
are  full  of  pompous  affectation ;  and  that  from  the  middle 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  a  constrained  and  affected 
manner  had  prevailed  throughout  Europe,  symbolised  by 
the  wig  worn  by  Louis  XIV.  in  pictures  and  bas-reliefs, 
where  he  is  portrayed  sometimes  as  Jupiter  and  some- 
times as  Hercules  clad  only  in  his  lion's  skin — but  al- 
ways with  the  perruque.     Heine  complains  that  Mme.  de 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  145 

Stael  fell  into  the  hands  of  the  Schlegels,  when  in  Ger- 
many, and  that  her  account  of  German  literature  was  col- 
oured by  their  prejudices;  that  William  Schlegel,  in  par- 
ticular, became  her  escort  at  all  the  capitals  of  Europe 
and  won  great  'eclat  thereby 

SchlegePs  elegiac  lament  over  the  decay  of  chivalry 
may  remind  the  English  reader  of  the  famous  passage  in 
Burke  *  about  Marie  Antoinette.  "  Little  did  I  dream 
that  I  should  have  lived  to  see  such  disasters  fallen  upon 
her  in  a  nation  of  gallant  men,  in  a  nation  of  men  of 
honour  and  of  cavaliers.  I  thought  ten  thousand  swords 
must  have  leaped  from  their  scabbards  to  avenge  even  a 
look  that  threatened  her  with  insult.  But  the  age  of 
chivalry  is  gone.  That  of  sophisters,  economists,  and 
calculators  has  succeeded;  and  the  glory  of  Europe  is 
extinguished  forever.  Never,  never  more  shall  we  behold 
that  generous  loyalty  to  rank  and  sex,  that  proud  submis- 
sion, that  dignified  obedience,  that  subordination  of  the 
heart,  which  kept  alive,  even  in  servitude  itself,  the  spirit 
of  an  exalted  freedom.  The  unbought  grace  of  life,  the 
cheap  defence  of  nations,  the  nurse  of  manly  sentiment 
and  heroic  enterprise  is  gone!  It  is  gone,  that  sensibil- 
ity of  principle,  that  chastity  of  honour,  which  felt  a  stain 
like  a  wound,  which  inspired  courage  whilst  it  mitigated 
ferocity,  which  ennobled  whatever  it  touched,  and  under 
which  vice  itself  lost  half  its  evil  by  losing  all  its  gross- 
ness."  f 

But  Burke's  reaction   against  the  levelling  spirit  of 

*Gentz,  "The  German  Burke,"  translated  the  "Reflections 
on  the  Revolution  in  France  "  into  German  in  1796. 

f  See  also  in  the  same  tract,  Burke's  tribute  to  the  value  of 
hereditary  nobility,  and  remember  that  these  were  the  words 
of  a  Whig  statesman.  ^^— 


UMtVE**^ 


146  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

French  democracy  was  by  no  means  so  thoroughgoing  as 
the  romanticist  protest  in  Germany.  It  was  manifestly 
impossible  to  revive  the  orders  of  chivalry,  as  a  practical 
military  system ;  or  to  recreate  the  feudal  tenures  in  their 
entirety.  Nor  did  even  the  most  romantic  of  the  German 
romanticists  dream  of  this.  They  appealed,  however,  to 
the  knightly  principles  of  devotion  to  church  and  king, 
of  honour,  of  religious  faith,  and  of  personal  loyalty  to 
the  suzerain  and  the  nobility.  It  was  these  political 
and  theological  aspects  of  the  movement  that  disgusted 
Heine.  He  says  that  just  as  Christianity  was  a  reaction 
against  Roman  materialism;  and  the  Renaissance  a  re- 
action against  the  extravagances  of  Christian  spiritual- 
ism ;  and  romanticism  in  turn  a  reaction  against  the  vapid 
imitations  of  antique  classic  art;  "so  also  do  we  now 
behold  a  reaction  against  the  re-introduction  of  that 
Catholic,  feudal  mode  of  thought,  of  that  knight-errantry 
and  priestdom,  which  were  being  inculcated  through  lit- 
erature and  the  pictorial  arts.  .  .  .  For  when  the  artists 
of  the  Middle  Ages  were  recommended  as  models  .  .  . 
the  only  explanation  of  their  superiority  that  could  be 
given  was  that  these  men  believed  in  that  which  they  de- 
picted. .  .  .  Hence  the  artists  who  were  honest  in  their 
devotion  to  art,  and  who  sought  to  imitate  the  pious  dis- 
tortions of  those  miraculous  pictures,  the  sacred  uncouth- 
ness  of  those  marvel-abounding  poems,  and  the  inex- 
plicable mysticisms  of  those  olden  works  .  .  made  a 
pilgrimage  to  Rome,  where  the  vicegerent  of  Christ  was 
to  re-invigorate  consumptive  German  art  with  asses' 
milk." 

A  number  of  the  romanticists  were  Catholic  by  birth. 
There  was  Joseph  von  Eichendorff,  e.g.,  who  had  a  strong 


The  %omantic  School  in  Germany.  147 

admiration  for  the  Middle  Ages,  wrote  sacred  poetry,  and 
published  in  1815  a  novel  entitled  "  Ahnung  und  Gegen- 
wart,"  the  hero  of  which  ends  by  retiring  to  a  monastery. 
And  Joseph  Gorres,  who  published  a  work  on  German 
Volksbiicher*  (1807);  a  follower  of  Schelling  and  editor 
of  Der  Rheinische  Merkur,  a  violent  anti-Gallican  jour- 
nal during  the  war  of  liberation.  Gorres,  according  to 
Heine,  "  threw  himself  into  the  arms  of  the  Jesuits,"  and 
became  the  "  chief  support  of  the  Catholic  propaganda  at 
Munich  " ;  lecturing  there  on  universal  history  to  an  audi- 
ence consisting  chiefly  of  pupils  from  the  Romish  semi- 
naries. Another  Spatromantiker,  born  Catholic,  was 
Clemens  Brentano,  whom  Heine  describes  in  1833  as 
having  lived  at  Frankfort  for  the  last  fifteen  years  in 
hermit-like  seclusion,  as  a  corresponding  member  of  the 
propaganda.  For  six  years  (1818-24)  Brentano  was  con- 
stantly at  the  bedside  of  the  invalid  nun,  Anna  Katharina 
Emmerich,  at  Dulmen.  She  was  a  "  stigmatic,"  afflicted, 
*>.,  with  a  mysterious  disease  which  impressed  upon  her 
body  marks  thought  to  be  miraculous  counterfeits  of  the 
wounds  of  Christ.  She  had  trances  and  visions,  and 
uttered  revelations  which  Brentano  recorded  and  after- 
wards published  in  several  volumes,  that  were  translated 
into  French  and  Italian  and  widely  circulated  among  the 
faithful. 

As  adherents  of  the  romantic  school  who  were  born  and 
bred  Protestants,  but  became  converts  to  the  Catholic 
faith,  Heine  enumerates  Friedrich  Schlegel,  Tieck,  No- 
valis,  Werner,  Schiitz,  Carove\  Adam  Miiller,  and  Count 

*  Dream  books,  medicine  books,  riddle  books,  almanacs, 
craftsmen's  proverbs,  fabulous  travels,  prophecies,  legends, 
romances  and  the  like,  hawked  about  at  fairs. 


148  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Stolberg.  This  list,  he  says,  includes  only  authors ;  "  the 
number  of  painters  who  in  swarms  simultaneously  abjured 
Protestantism  and  reason  was  much  larger."  But  Tieck 
and  Novalis  never  formally  abjured  Protestantism.  They 
detested  the  Reformation  and  loved  the  mediaeval  Church, 
but  looked  upon  modern  Catholicism  as  a  degenerate 
system.  Their  position  here  was  something  like  that  of 
the  English  Tractarians  in  the  earlier  stages  of  the  Oxford 
movement.  Novalis  composed  "  Marienlieder."  Tieck 
complained  of  the  dryness  of  Protestant  ritual  and  the- 
ology, and  said  that  in  the  Middle  Ages  there  was  a  unity 
{Einheif)  which  ought  to  be  again  recovered.  All  Europe 
was  then  one  fatherland  with  a  single  faith.  The  period 
of  the  Arthursage  was  the  blossoming  time  of  romance, 
the  vernal  season  of  love,  religion,  chivalry,  and — sorcery ! 
He  pleaded  for  the  creation  of  a  new  Christian,  Catholic 
mythology. 

In  1808  Friedrich  Schlegel  became  a  Roman  Catholic 
— or,  as  Heine  puts  it — "went  to  Vienna,  where  he  at- 
tended mass  daily  and  ate  broiled  fowl."  His  wife,  a 
daughter  of  Moses  Mendelssohn,  a  Jewess  by  race,  fol- 
lowed her  husband  into  the  Catholic  Church.  Zacharias 
Werner,  author  of  a  number  of  romantic  melodramas,  the 
heroes  of  which  are  described  as  monkish  ascetics,  relig- 
ious mystics,  and  "  spirits  who  wander  on  earth  in  the 
guise  of  harp-players  " — Zacharias  Werner  also  went  to 
Vienna  and  joined  the  order  of  Ligorians.  This  conver- 
sion made  a  prodigious  noise  in  Germany.  It  occurred 
at  Rome  in  181 1,  and  the  convert  afterwards  witnessed 
the  liquefaction  of  the  blood  of  St.  Januarius  at  Naples, 
that  annual  miracle  in  which  Newman  expresses  so  firm 
a  belief.     Werner  then  spent  two  years  in  the  study  of 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  149 

theology,  visited  Our  Lady's  Chapel  at  Loretto  in  18 13; 
was  ordained  priest  at  Aschaffenburg  in  18 14;  and 
preached  at  St.  Stephen's  Church,  Vienna,  on  the  vanity 
of  worldly  pleasures,  with  fastings  many,  with  castiga- 
tions  and  mortifications  of  the  flesh.  The  younger  Voss 
declared  that  Werner's  religion  was  nothing  but  a  poetic 
coquetting  with  God,  Mary,  the  wounds  of  Christ,  and 
the  holy  carbuncle  (Karfunkelsteiri).  He  had  been  a 
man  of  dissolute  life  and  had  been  divorced  from  three 
wives.  "  His  enthusiasm  for  the  restoration  of  the  Mid- 
dle Ages,"  says  Heine,  "was  one-sided;  it  applied  only 
to  the  hierarchical,  Catholic  phase  of  mediaevalism ;  feu- 
dalism did  not  so  strongly  appeal  to  his  fancy.  .  .  .  Pater 
Zacharias  died  in  1823,  after  sojourning  for  fifty-four 
years  in  this  wicked,  wicked  world."  Carlyle  contrib- 
uted to  the  Foreign  Review 'in  1828  an  essay  on  "Werner's 
Life  and  Writings,"  with  translations  of  passages  from 
his  drama,  "  The  Templars  in  Cyprus." 

But  the  conversion  which  caused  the  greatest  scandal 
was  that  of  Count  Friedrich  Stolberg,  whose  apostasy 
was  denounced  by  his  early  friend  Voss,  the  translator 
of  Homer,  in  a  booklet  entitled  "  Wie  ward  Fritz  Stol- 
berg ein  Unfreier?"  Voss  showed,  says  Heine,  that 
"Stolberg  had  secretly  joined  an  association  of  the  no- 
bility which  had  for  its  purpose  to  counteract  the  French 
ideas  of  liberty;  that  these  nobles  entered  into  a  league 
with  the  Jesuits ;  that  they  sought,  through  the  re-estab- 
lishment of  Catholicism,  to  advance  also  the  interests  of 
the  nobility."  * 

The  German  literary  historians  agree  that  the  fresh 
outbreak  of  romanticism  in  the  last  decade  of  the  eigh- 
*  For  Stolberg  see  also  vol.  i.,  pp.  376-77. 


150  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

teenth  century  was  the  resumption  of  an  earlier  movement 
which  had  been  interrupted;  that  it  was  furthered  by  the 
new  feeling  of  German  nationality  aroused  by  the  Bona- 
partist  tyranny;  and  finally  that  it  was  a  protest  against 
the  flat  mediocrity  which  ruled  in  the  ultra-evangelical 
circle  headed  by  Nicolai,  the  Berlin  bookseller  and  edi- 
tor. Into  this  mere  Philistinism  had  narrowed  itself  the 
nobler  rationalism  of  Lessing,  with  its  distrust  of  Trau- 
merei  and  Schwarmerei — of  superstition  and  fanaticism. 
"Dry  light  is  best,"  says  Bacon,  but  the  eye  is  hungry 
for  colour,  that  has  looked  too  steadily  on  the  lumen  siccutn 
of  the  reason;  and  then  imagination  becomes  the  prism 
which  breaks  the  invisible  sunbeam  into  beauty.  Hence 
"V-the  somewhat  extravagant  romantic  love  of  colour,  and  the 
determination  to  believe,  at  all  hazards  and  even  in  the 
teeth  of  reason.  Hence  the  imperfectly  successful  at- 
tempt to  force  back  the  modern  mind  into  a  posture  of 
child-like  assent  to  the  marvellous.  Tieck's  "  Mahrchen  " 
and  the  Grimm  brothers'  nursery  tales  belong  to  this 
"renascence  of  wonder,"  like  Lewis'  "Tales  of  Terror," 
Scott's  "  Demonology,"  and  Coleridge's  "  Christabel "  in 
England.  "The  tendencies  of  1770  to  1780,"  says 
Scherer,  "which  had  now  quite  disappeared,  asserted 
themselves  with  new  and  increased  force.  The  nations 
which  were  groaning  under  Napoleon's  oppression  sought 
comfort  in  the  contemplation  of  a  fairer  and  grander 
past.  Patriotism  and  mediaevalism  became  for  a  long 
time  the  watchwords  and  the  dominating  fashion  of  the 
day." 

Allowing  for  the  differences  mentioned,  the  romantic 
movements  in  England  and  Germany  offer,  as  might  be 
expected,   many  interesting  parallels.     Carlyle,  writing 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  151 

in  1827,*  says  that  the  recent  change  in  German  litera- 
ture is  only  a  part  of  a  general  change  in  the  whole  liter- 
ature of  Europe.  "  Among  ourselves,  for  instance,  within 
the  last  thirty  years,  who  has  not  lifted  up  his  voice  with 
double  vigour  in  praise  of  Shakespeare  and  nature,  and 
vituperation  of  French  taste  and  French  philosophy? 
Who  has  not  heard  of  the  glories  of  old  English  litera- 
ture; the  wealth  of  Queen  Elizabeth's  age;  the  penury  of 
Queen  Anne's;  and  the  inquiry  whether  Pope  was  a  poet? 
A  similar  temper  is  breaking  out  in  France  itself,  her- 
metically sealed  as  that  country  seemed  to  be  against  all 
foreign  influences;  and  doubts  are  beginning  to  be  enter- 
tained, and  even  expressed,  about  Corneille  and  the  three 
unities.  It  seems  to  be  substantially  the  same  thing 
which  has  occurred  in  Germany,  and  been  attributed  to 
Tieck  and  his  associates;  only  that  the  revolution  which 
is  here  proceeding,  and  in  France  commencing,  appears 
in  Germany  to  be  completed." 

In  Germany,  as  in  England — in  Germany  more  than 
in  England — other  arts  beside  literature  partook  of  the 
new  spirit.  The  brothers  Boissere'e  agitated  for  the  com- 
pletion of  the  "Kolner  Dom,"  and  collected  their  famous 
picture  gallery  to  illustrate  the  German,  Dutch,  and  Flem- 
ish art  of  the  fifteenth  century;  just  as  Gothic  came  into 
fashion  in  England  largely  in  consequence  of  the  writ- 
ings of  Walpole,  Scott,  and  Ruskin.  Like  our  own  later 
Pre-Raphaelite  group,  German  art  critics  began  to  praise 
the  naive  awkwardness  of  execution  and  devout  spiritual- 
ity of  feeling  in  the  old  Florentine  painters,  and  German 
artists  strove  to  paint  like  Fra  Angelico.  Friedrich 
Schlegel  gave  a  strong  impulse  to  the  study  of  mediaeval 

*  " Ludwig  Tieck  "  :  Introductions  to  "  German  Romance." 


152  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

art,  and  Heine  scornfully  describes  him  and  his  friend 
Joseph  Gorres,  rummaging  .  about  "  among  the  ancient 
Rhine  cities  for  the  remains  of  old  German  pictures  and 
statuary  which  were  superstitiously  worshipped  as  holy 
relics."  Tieck  and  his  friend  Wackenroder  brought  back 
from  their  pilgrimage  to  Dresden  in  1796  a  devotion,  a 
kind  of  sentimental  Mariolatry,  to  the  celebrated  Madon- 
nas of  Raphael  and  Holbein  in  the  Dresden  gallery; 
and  from  their  explorations  in  Niirnberg,  that  Perle  des 
Mittelalters,  an  enthusiasm  for  Albrecht  Diirer.  This 
found  expression  in  Wackenroder's  "  Herzensergiessun- 
gen  eines  Kunstliebenden  Klosterbruders " ;  and  in 
Tieck's  novel,  "  Sternbald's  Wanderungen,"  in  which  he 
accompanies  a  pupil  of  Diirer  to  Rome.  Wackenroder, 
like  Tieck's  other  friend,  Novalis,  was  of  a  consumptive, 
emotional,  and  somewhat  womanish  constitution  of  mind 
and  body,  and  died  young.  Tieck  edited  his  remains, 
including  letters  on  old  German  art.  The  standard  edi- 
tions of  their  joint  writings  are  illustrated  by  engravings 
after  Diirer,  one  of  which  in  particular,  the  celebrated 
"Knight,  Death,  and  the  Devil/7  symbolizes  the  mysteri- 
ous terrors  of  Tieck's  own  tales,  and  of  German  romance 
in  general.  The  knight  is  in  complete  armour,  and  is 
riding  through  a  forest.  On  a  hilltop  in  the  distance  are 
the  turrets  of  a  castle;  a  lean  hound  follows  the  knight; 
on  the  ground  between  his  horse's  hoofs  sprawls  a  lizard- 
like reptile;  a  figure  on  horseback  approaches  from  the 
right,  with  the  face  half  obliterated  or  eaten  away  to  the 
semblance  of  a  skull,  and  snakes  encircling  the  temples. 
Behind  comes  on  a  demon  or  goblin  shape,  with  a  tall 
curving  horn,  which  is  "neither  man  nor  woman,  neither 
beast  nor  human,"  but  one  of  those  grotesque  and  ob- 


The  '^Romantic  School  in  Germany,  153 

scene  monsters  which  the  mediaeval  imagination  sculp- 
tured upon  the  cathedrals.  This  famous  copperplate 
prompted  Fouque's  romance,  "  Sintram  and  his  Com- 
panions." He  had  received  a  copy  of  it  for  a  birthday 
gift,  and  brooded  for  years  over  its  mysterious  signifi- 
cance; which  finally  shaped  itself  in  his  imagination  into 
an  allegory  of  the  soul's  conflict  with  the  powers  of  dark- 
ness. His  whole  narrative  leads  up  to  the  description 
of  Diirer's  picture,  which  occupies  the  twenty-seventh  and 
climacteric  chapter.  The  school  of  young  German  Pre- 
Raphaelite  art  students,  associated  at  Rome  in  1810  under 
the  leadership  of  Overbeck  and  Cornelius,  was  considera- 
bly influenced  by  Wackenroder's  "  Herzensergiessungen." 

Music,  too,  and  particularly  church  music,  was  affected 
by  the  new  taste.  The  ancient  music  of  the  "  Dies  Irae  " 
and  other  Latin  hymns  was  revived ;  and  it  would  not  be 
far  wrong  to  say  that  the  romantic  school  sowed  the  seed 
of  Wagner's  great  music-dramas,  profoundly  Teutonic  and 
romantic  in  their  subject  matter  and  handling  and  in  their 
application  of  the  united  arts  of  poetry,  music,  and  scene- 
painting  to  old  national  legends  such  as  "Parzival," 
"Tannhauser,"*  "The  Knight  of  the  Swan,"  and  the 
"Nibelungen  Hoard." 

History,  too,  and  Germanic  philology  took  impulse 
from  this  fresh  interest  in  the  past.  Johannes  Muller,  in 
his  "History  of  the  Swiss  Confederation"  (1780-95), 
drew  the  first  appreciative  picture  of  mediaeval  life,  and 
caught,  in  his  diction,  something  of  the  manner  of  the 
old  chroniclers.  As  in  England  ancient  stores  of  folk- 
lore and  popular  poetry  were  gathered  and  put  forth  by 

*Brentano's  fragment  "Die  Erfindung  des  Rosenkranzes, " 
begun  in  1803,  deals  with  the  Tannhauser  story. 


154  *4  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Percy,  Ritson,  Ellis,  Scott,  and  others,  so  in  Germany  the 
Grimm  brothers'  universally  known  collections  of  fairy 
tales,  legends,  and  mythology  began  to  appear.*  Tieck 
published  in  1803  his  "  Minnelieder  aus  dem  Schwab- 
ischen  Zeitalter."  Karl  Simrock  made  modern  versions 
of  Middle  High  German  poetry.  Uhland,  whose  "  Wal- 
ther  von  der  Vogelweide,"  says  Scherer,  "gave  the 
first  complete  picture  of  an  old  German  singer,"  carried 
the  war  into  Africa  by  going  to  Paris  in  18 10  and  mak- 
ing a  study  of  the  French  Middle  Age.  He  introduced 
the  old  French  epics  to  the  German  public,  and  is  re- 
garded, with  A.  W.  Schlegel,  as  the  founder  of  romance 
philology  in  Germany. 

A  pupil  of  Bodmer,f  the  Swiss  Christian  Heinrich 
Myller,  had  issued  a  complete  edition  of  the  "  Nibelun- 
genlied"  in  1784-85.  The  romantic  school  now  took  up 
this  old  national  epic  and  praised  it  as  a  German  Iliad, 
unequalled  in  sublimity  and  natural  power.  Uhland 
gave  a  great  deal  of  study  to  it,  and  A.  W.  Schlegel  lec- 
tured upon  it  at  Berlin  in  1801-2.  Both  Schlegel  and 
Tieck  made  plans  to  edit  it;  and  Friedrich  von  der 
Hagen,  inspired  by  the  former's  lectures,  published  four 
editions  of  it,  and  a  version  in  modern  German.  "  For 
a  long  time,"  testifies  Heine,  "  the  *  Nibelungenlied '  was 
the  sole  topic  of  discussion  among  us.  .  .  .  It  is  difficult 
for  a  Frenchman  to  form  a  conception  of  this  work,  or 
even  of  the  language  in  which  it  is  written.  It  is  a  lan- 
guage of  stone,  and  the  verses  are,  as  it  were,  blocks  of 
granite."     By  way  of  giving  his  French  readers  a  notion 

*"  Kinder  und    Hausmahrchen  "     (1812-15).      "Deutsche 
Sagen"  (1816).     "  Deutsche  Mythologie"  (1835). 
f  See  vol.  i.,  pp.  375-76. 


The  ^Romantic  School  in  Germany.  155 

of  the  gigantic  passions  and  rude,  primitive  strength  of 
the  poem,  he  imagines  a  battle  of  all  the  Gothic  cathe- 
drals of  Europe  on  some  vast  plain,  and  adds,  "  But  no ! 
even  then  you  can  form  no  conception  of  the  chief  char- 
acters of  the  '  Nibelungenlied';  no  steeple  is  so  high,  no 
stone  so  hard  as  the  fierce  Hagen,  or  the  revengeful 
Chrimhilde." 

Another  work  which  corresponds  roughly  with  Percy's 
"  Reliques,"  as  the  "  Nibelungenlied  "  with  Macpherson's 
"  Ossian,"  was  "  Des  Knaben  Wunderhorn  "  (The  Boy's 
Magic  Trumpet),  published  in  1806-8  by  Clemens  Bren- 
tano  and  Achim  von  Arnim,  with  a  dedication  to  Goethe. 
This  was  a  three-volume  collection  of  German  songs, 
and  although  it  came  much  later  than  Percy's,  and  after 
the  imitation  of  old  national  balladry  in  Germany  was 
already  well  under  way,  so  that  its  relation  to  German 
romanticism  is  not  of  an  initial  kind,  like  that  of  Percy's 
collection  in  England;  still  its  importance  was  very 
great.  It  influenced  all  the  lyrical  poetry  of  the  Roman- 
tic school,  and  especially  the  ballads  of  Uhland.  "I 
cannot  sufficiently  extol  this  book,"  says  Heine.  "It 
contains  the  sweetest  flowers  of  German  poesy.  .  .  .  On 
the  title  page  ...  is  the  picture  of  a  lad  blowing  a  horn ; 
and  when  a  German  in  a  foreign  land  views  this  picture, 
he  almost  seems  to  hear  the  old  familiar  strains,  and 
homesickness  steals  over  him.  ...  In  these  ballads  one 
feels  the  beating  of  the  German  popular  heart.  Here  is 
revealed  all  its  sombre  merriment,  all  its  droll  wit.  Here 
German  wrath  beats  furiously  the  drum ;  here  German 
satire  stings ;  here  German  love  kisses.  Here  we  behold 
the  sparkling  of  genuine  German  wine,  and  genuine  Ger- 
man tears." 


156  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

The  German  romantic  school,  like  the  English,  but 
more  learnedly  and  systematically,  sought  to  reinforce  its 
native  stock  of  materials  by  motifs  drawn  from  foreign 
literatures,  and  particularly  from  Norse  mythology  and 
from  Spanish  romance.  Percy's  translation  of  Malet: 
Gray's  versions  from  the  Welsh  and  the  Scandinavian : 
Southey's  "  Chronicles  of  the  Cid"  and  Lockhart's  trans- 
lations of  the  Spanish  ballads  are  paralleled  in  Germany 
by  William  Schlegel's,  and  Uhland's,  and  others'  studies 
in  old  Norse  mythology  and  poetry ;  by  Tieck's  transla- 
tion of  "  Don  Quixote  "  *  and  by  Johann  Dietrich  Gries' 
of  Calderon.  The  romanticists,  indeed,  and  especially 
Tieck  and  A.  W.  Schlegel,  were  most  accomplished  trans- 
lators. Schlegel's  great  version  of  Shakspere  is  justly 
esteemed  one  of  the  glories  of  the  German  tongue. 
Heine  affirms  that  it  was  undertaken  solely  for  polem- 
ical purposes  and  at  a  time  (1797)  when  the  enthusiasm 
for  the  Middle  Ages  had  not  yet  reached  an  extravagant 
height.  "Later,  when  this  did  occur,  Calderon  was 
translated  and  ranked  far  above  Shakespeare.  .  .  .  For 
the  works  of  Calderon  bear  most  distinctly  the  impress 
of  the  poetry  of  the  Middle  Ages,  particularly  of  the  two 
principal  epochs,  knight-errantry  and  monasticism.  The 
pious  comedies  of  the  Castilian  priest-poet,  whose  poet- 
ical flowers  had  been  besprinkled  with  holy  water  and 
canonical  perfumes  .  .  .  were  now  set  up  as  models,  and 
Germany  swarmed  with  fantastically  pious,  insanely  pro- 
found poems,  over  which  it  was  the  fashion  to  work  one's 

*  "If  Cervantes'  purpose,"  says  Heine,  "was  merely  to  de- 
scribe the  fools  who  sought  to  restore  the  chivalry  of  the  Mid- 
dle Ages,  .  .  .  then  it  is  a  peculiarly  comic  irony  of  accident 
that  the  romantic  school  should  furnish  the  best  translation  of 
a  book  in  which  their  own  folly  is  most  amusingly  ridiculed. " 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  157 

self  into  a  mystic  ecstasy  of  admiration,  as  in  *  The  De- 
votion to  the  Cross ' ;  or  to  fight  in  honour  of  the  Ma- 
donna, as  in  *The  Constant  Prince/  .  .  .  Our  poetry  ? 
said  the  Schlegels,  is  superannuated.  .  .  .  Our  emotions 
are  withered ;  our  imagination  is  dried  up.  .  .  .  We  must 
seek  again  the  choked-up  springs  of  the  naive,  simple 
poetry  of  the  Middle  Ages,  where  bubbles  the  elixir  of 
youth."  Heine  adds  that  Tieck,  following  out  this  pre- 
scription, drank  so  deeply  of  the  mediaeval  folk  tales 
and  ballads  that  he  actually  became  a  child  again  and 
fell  to  lisping. 

There  is  a  suggestive  analogy  between  the  position  of 
the  Warton  brothers  in  England  and  the  Schlegel  brothers 
in  Germany.  The  Schlegels,  like  the  Wartons,  were 
leaders  in  the  romantic  movement  of  their  time  and  coun- 
try, and  were  the  inspirers  of  other  men.  The  two  pairs 
were  alike  also  in  that  their  best  service  was  done  in  the 
field  of  literary  history,  criticism,  and  exposition,  while 
their  creative  work  was  imitative  and  of  comparatively 
small  value.  Friedrich  Schlegel's  scandalous  romance 
"Lucinde"  is  of  much  less  importance  than  his  very 
stimulating  lectures  on  the  "  History  of  Literature  "  and 
the  "  Wisdom  and  Languages  of  India  " ;  *  and  his  elder 
brother,  though  an  accomplished  metrist  and  translator, 
was  not  successful  in  original  verse.  But  this  resem- 
blance between  the  Wartons  and  the  Schlegels  must  not 
be  pressed  too  far.  Here,  as  at  many  other  points,  the 
German  movement  had  greater  momentum.  The  Wartons 
were  men  of  elegant  scholarship  after  their  old-fashioned 

*  F.  Schlegel' s  declamations  against  printing  and  gun  pow- 
der in  his  Vienna  lectures  of  1810  foretoken  Ruskin's  philip- 
pics against  railways  and  factories. 


158  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

kind,  a  kind  which  joined  the  usual  classical  culture  of 
the  English  universities  to  a  liberal — and  in  their  cen- 
tury somewhat  paradoxical — enthusiasm  in  antiquarian 
pursuits.  But  the  Schlegels  were  men  of  really  wide 
learning  and  of  depth  in  criticism.  Compared  with  their 
scientific  method  and  grasp  of  principles,  the  "  Observa- 
tions "  and  "  Essays  "  of  the  Wartons  are  mere  dilettant- 
ism. To  the  influence  of  the  Schlegels  is  not  unfairly 
attributed  the  origin  in  Germany  of  the  sciences  of  com- 
parative philology  and  comparative  mythology,  and  the 
works  of  scholars  like  Bopp,  Diez,  and  the  brothers 
Grimm.  Herder  *  had  already  traced  the  broad  cosmo- 
politan lines  which  German  literary  scholarship  was  to 
follow,  with  German  thoroughness  and  independence. 
And  Heine  acknowledges  that  "  in  reproductive  criticism, 
where  the  beauties  of  a  work  of  art  were  to  be  brought 
out  clearly ;  where  a  delicate  perception  of  individualities 
was  required;  and  where  these  were  to  be  made  intelli- 
gible, the  Schlegels  were  far  superior  to  Lessing."  (The 
one  point  at  which  the  English  movement  outweighed 
the  German  was  Walter  Scott,  whose  creative  vigour  and 
fertility  made  an  impact  upon  the  mind  of  Europe  to 
which  the  romantic  literature  of  the  Continent  affords  no 
counterparts 

The  principles  of  the  Schlegelian  criticism  were  first 
communicated  to  the  English  public  by  Coleridge;  who, 
in  his  lectures  on  Shakspere  and  other  dramatists, 
helped  himself  freely  to  William  Schlegel's  "  Vorlesun- 
gen  liber  dramatische  Kunst  und  Litteratur."  f     Heine 

*  See  vol.  i.,  pp.  300,  337,  416. 

f  Vide  supra,  p.  88.  A.  W.  Schlegel  was  in  England  in 
1823.  Tieck  met  Coleridge  in  England  in  18 18,  having  made 
his  acquaintance  in  Italy  some  ten  years  before. 


The  'T^pmantic  School  in  Germany.  159 

denounces  the  shallowness  of  these  principles  and  their 
failure  to  comprehend  the  modern  mind.  "  When  Schle- 
gel  seeks  to  depreciate  the  poet  Burger,  he  compares  his 
ballads  with  the  old  English  ballads  of  the  Percy  col- 
lection, and  he  shows  that  the  latter  are  more  simple, 
more  naive,  more  antique,  and  consequently  more  poet- 
ical. .  .  .  But  death  is  not  more  poetical  than  life.  The 
old  English  ballads  of  the  Percy  collection  exhale  the 
spirit  of  their  age,  and  Burger's  ballads  breathe  the  spirit 
of  our  time.  The  latter,  Schlegel  never  understood.  .  .  . 
What  increased  Schlegel's  reputation  still  more  was  the 
sensation  which  he  excited  in  France,  where  he  also  at- 
tacked the  literary  authorities  of  the  French,  .  .  .  showed 
the  French  that  their  whole  classical  literature  was  worth- 
less, that  Moliere  was  a  buffoon  and  no  poet,  that  Racine 
likewise  was  of  no  account  .  .  .  that  the  French  are  the 
most  prosaic  people  of  the  world,  and  that  there  is  no 
poetry  in  France."  It  is  well  known  that  Coleridge  de- 
tested the  French,  as  "  a  light  but  cruel  race  " ;  that  he 
undervalued  their  literature  and  even  affected  an  igno- 
rance of  the  language.  The  narrowness  of  Schlegelian 
criticism  was  only  the  excess  of  Teutonism  reacting 
against  the  previous  excesses  of  Gallic  classicism. 

The  deficiency  of  creative  imagination  in  the  Schlegels 
was  supplied  by  their  disciple  Ludwig  Tieck,  who  made 
the  "  Mahrchen,"  or  popular  traditionary  tale,  his  pecul- 
iar province.'  It  was  Wackenroder  who  first  drew  his 
attention  to  "  those  old,  poorly  printed  Volksbiicher,  with 
their  coarse  wood-cuts  which  had  for  centuries  been  cir- 
culating among  the  peasantry,  and  which  may  still  be 
picked  up  at  the  book-stalls  of  the  Leipzig  fairs."  * 
*  Boyesen  :  "Aspects  of  the  Romantic  School." 


160  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Tieck's  volume  of  "  Volksmahrchen  "  (1797)  gave  repro- 
ductions of  a  number  of  these  old  tales,  such  as  the 
"  Haimonskinder,"  the  "  Schone  Magelone,"  "  Tann- 
hauser,"  and  the  "  Schildbiirger."  His  "Phantasus" 
(18 1 2)  contained  original  tales  conceived  in  the  same 
spirit.  Scherer  says  that  Tieck  uttered  the  manifesto  of 
German  romanticism  in  the  following  lines  from  the 
overture  of  his  "  Kaiser  Octavianus  " : 

"  Mondbeglanzte  Zaubernacht, 
Die  den  Sinn  gefangen  halt, 
Wundervolle  Mahrchenwelt, 
Steig  auf  in  der  alten  Pracht !  " 

"Forest  solitude"  [Waldeinsatnkeif],  says  Boyesen,* 
"  churchyards  at  midnight,  ruins  of  convents  and  baron- 
ial castles ;  in  fact,  all  the  things  which  we  are  now  apt 
to  call  romantic,  are  the  favourite  haunts  of  Tieck's  muse. 
.  .  .  Tieck  was  excessively  fond  of  moonlight  and  liter- 
ally flooded  his  tales  with  its  soft,  dim  splendour;  there- 
fore moonlight  is  now  romantic.  ...  He  never  allows  a 
hero  to  make  a  declaration  of  love  without  a  near  or  dis- 
tant accompaniment  of  a  bugle  (Schalmei  or  Waldhorn)\ 
accordingly  the  bugle  is  called  a  romantic  instrument." 

"The  true  tone  of  that  ancient  time,"  says  Carlyle,f 
"when  man  was  in  his  childhood,  when  the  universe 
within  was  divided  by  no  wall  of  adamant  from  the  uni- 
verse without,  and  the  forms  of  the  Spirit  mingled  and 
dwelt  in  trustful  sisterhood  with  the  forms  of  the  Sense, 
was  not  easy  to  seize  and  adapt  with  any  fitness  of  ap- 
plication to  the  feelings  of  modern  minds.  It  was  to 
penetrate  into  the  inmost  shrines  of  Imagination,  where 

*  Ibid. 

f  "Ludwig  Tieck,"  in  "German  Romance." 


The  cRpmantic  School  in  Germany.  161 

human  passion  and  action  are  reflected  in  dim  and  fitful, 
but  deeply  significant  resemblances,  and  to  copy  these 
with  the  guileless,  humble  graces  which  alone  can  become 
them.  .  .  .  The  ordinary  lovers  of  witch  and  fairy  matter 
will  remark  a  deficiency  of  spectres  and  enchantments, 
and  complain  that  the  whole  is  rather  dull.  Cultivated 
free-thinkers,  again,  well  knowing  that  no  ghosts  or  elves 
exist  in  this  country,  will  smile  at  the  crack-brained 
dreamer,  with  his  spelling-book  prose  and  doggerel  verse, 
and  dismiss  him  good-naturedly  as  a  German  Lake  poet." 
"  In  these  works,"  says  Heine,  "  there  reigns  a  mysterious 
intenseness,  a  peculiar  sympathy  with  nature,  especially 
with  the  vegetable  and  mineral  kingdoms.  The  reader 
feels  himself  transported  into  an  enchanted  forest ;  he 
hears  the  melodious  gurgling  of  subterranean  waters;  at 
times  he  seems  to  distinguish  his  own  name  in  the  rus- 
tling of  the  trees.  Ever  and  anon  a  nameless  dread  seizes 
upon  him  as  the  broad-leaved  tendrils  entwine  his  feet; 
strange  and  marvellous  wild  flowers  gaze  at  him  with 
their  bright,  languishing  eyes;  invisible  lips  mockingly 
press  tender  kisses  on  his  cheeks;  gigantic  mushrooms, 
which  look  like  golden  bells,  grow  at  the  foot  of  the 
trees ;  large  silent  birds  sway  to  and  fro  on  the  branches 
overhead,  put  on  a  sapient  look  and  solemnly  nod  their 
heads.  Everything  seems  to  hold  its  breath ;  all  is  hushed 
in  awed  expectation ;  suddenly  the  soft  tones  of  a  hunter's 
horn  are  heard,  and  a  lovely  female  form,  with  waving 
plumes  on  head  and  falcon  on  wrist,  rides  swiftly  by  on 
a  snow-white  steed.  And  this  beautiful  damsel  is  so  ex- 
quisitely lovely,  so  fair ;  her  eyes  are  of  the  violet's  hue, 
sparkling  with  mirth  and  at  the  same  time  earnest,  sin- 
cere, and  yet  ironical;  so  chaste  and  yet  so  full  of  tender 


1 62  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

passion,  like  the  fancy  of  our  excellent  Ludwig  Tieck. 
Yes,  his  fancy  is  a  charming,  high-born  maiden,  who  in 
the  forests  of  fairyland  gives  chase  to  fabulous  wild  beasts ; 
perhaps  she  even  hunts  the  rare  unicorn,  which  may  only 
be  caught  by  a  spotless  virgin." 

In  1827  Carlyle  *  published  translations  of  five  of 
Tieck's  "  Mahrchen,"  viz. :  "  The  Fair-Haired  Eckbert," 
"The  Trusty  Eckart,"  "The  Elves,"  "The  Runenberg," 
and  "The  Goblet."  He  mentioned  that  another  tale  had 
been  already  Englished — "  The  Pictures  "  (Die  Gemalde). 
This  version  was  by  Connop  Thirwall,  who  had  also  ren- 
dered "The  Betrothal"  in  1824.  In  spite  of  Carlyle's 
recommendations,  Tieck's  stories  seem  to  have  made 
small  impression  in  England.  Doubtless  they  came  too 
late,  and  the  romantic  movement,  by  1827,  had  spent  its 
first  force  in  a  country  already  sated  with  Scott's  poems 
and  novels.  Sarah  Austin,  a  daughter  of  William  Tay- 
lor of  Norwich,  went  to  Germany  to  study  German  litera- 
ture in  this  same  year  1827.  In  her  "  Fragments  from 
German  Prose  Writers"  (1841),  she  speaks  of  the  small 
success  of  Tieck's  stories  in  England,  but  testifies  that 
A.  W.  Schlegel's  dramatic  lectures  had  been  translated 
early  and  the  translation  frequently  reprinted.  Another 
of  the  Norwich  Taylors — Edgar — was  the  translator  of 
Grimm's  "  Haus-  und  Kinder- Mahrchen."  Julius  Hare, 
who  was  at  school  at  Weimar  in  the  winter  of  1804-5, 
rendered  three  of  Tieck's  tales,  as  well  as  Fouque's 
"Sintram"  (1820). 

It  is  interesting  to  note  that  Tieck  was  not  unknown  to 
Hawthorne  and  Poe.  The  latter  mentions  his  "  Journey 
into  the  Blue  Distance  "  in  his  "  Fall  of  the  House  of 
*  " German  Romance, "  four  vols.,  Edinburgh. 


The  <T{pmantic  School  in  Germany.  163 

Usher  " ;  and  in  an  early  review  of  Hawthorne's  "  Twice- 
Told  Tales"  (1842)  and  "Mosses  from  an  Old  Manse" 
(1846),  at  a  time  when  their  author  was  still,  in  his  own 
words,  "  the  obscurest  man  of  letters  in  America,"  Poe 
acutely  pointed  out  a  resemblance  between  Hawthorne 
and  Tieck ;  "  whose  manner,"  he  asserts,  I  in  some  of  his 
works,  is  absolutely  identical  with  that  hxbitual  to  Haw- 
thorne." One  finds  a  confirmation  of  .this  aper$u — or 
finds,  at  least,  that  Hawthorne  was  attracted  by  Tieck — 
in  passages  of  the  "American  Notebooks,"  where  he 
speaks  of  grubbing  out  several  pagos  of  Tieck  at  a  sit- 
ting, by  the  aid  of  a  German  dictionary.  Colonel  Hig- 
ginson  ("Short  Studies"),  apropos  of  Poe's  sham  learn- 
ing and  his  habit  of  mystifying  the  reader  by  imaginary 
citations,  confesses  to  having  hunted  in  vain  for  this  fas- 
cinatingly entitled  "Journey  into  the  Blue  Distance"; 
and  to  having  been  laughed  at  for  his  pains  by  a  friend 
who  assured  him  that  Poe  could  scarcely  read  a  word  of 
German.  But  Tieck  did  really  write  this  story,  "Das 
Alte  Buch:  oder  Reise  ins  Blaue  hinein,"  which  Poe 
misleadingly  refers  to  under  its  alternate  title.  There 
is,  indeed,  a  hint  of  allegory  in  Tieck's  "  Mahrchen  " — 
which  are  far  from  being  mere  fairy  tales — that  reminds 
one  frequently  of  Hawthorne's  shadowy  art — of  such 
things  as  "Ethan  Brand,"  or  "The  Minister's  Black 
Veil,"  or  "  The  Great  Carbuncle  of  the  White  Moun- 
tains." There  is,  e.g.,  "The  Elves,"  in  which  a  little 
girl  does  but  step  across  the  foot-bridge  over  the  brook 
that  borders  her  father's  garden,  to  find  herself  in  a 
magic  land  where  she  stays,  as  it  seems  to  her,  a  few 
hours ;  but  returns  home  to  learn  that  she  has  been  absent 
seven  years.     Or  there  is   "  The  Runenberg,"  where  a 


164  ss4  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

youth  wandering  in  the  mountains,  receives  from  a  sorcer- 
ess, through  the  casement  of  a  ruined  castle,  a  wondrous 
tablet  set  with  gems  in  a  mystic  pattern;  and  years  after- 
ward wanders  back  into  the  mountains,  leaving  home 
and  friends  to  search  for  fairy  jewels,  only  to  return  again 
to  his  village,  an  old  and  broken-down  man,  bearing  a 
sackful  of  worthless  pebbles  which  appear  to  him  the 
most  precious  scones.  And  there  is  the  story  of  "  The 
Goblet,"  where  the  theme  is  like  that  of  Hawthorne's 
"  Shaker  Bridal,"  a  pair  of  lovers  whose  union  is  thwarted 
and  postponed  until  finally,  when  too  late,  they  find  that 
only  the  ghost  or  the  memory  of  their  love  is  left  to  mock 
their  youthful  hope. 

But  the  mystic,  par  excellence,  among  the  German  ro- 
manticists was  Novalis,  of  whose  writings  Carlyle  gave 
a  sympathetic  account  in  the  Foreign  Review  for  1829. 
Novalis'  "Hymns  to  the  Night,"  written  in  Ossianic 
prose,  were  perhaps  not  without  influence  on  Longfellow 
("Voices  of  the  Night"),  but  his  most  significant  work 
was  his  unfinished  romance  "  Heinrich  von  Ofterdingen." 
The  hero  was  a  legendary  poet  of  the  time  of  the  Cru- 
sades, who  was  victor  in  a  contest  of  minstrelsy  on  the 
Wartburg.  But  in  Novalis'  romance  there  is  no  firm 
delineation  of  mediaeval  life — everything  is  dissolved 
in  a  mist  of  transcendentalism  and  allegory.  The  story 
opens  with  the  words :  "  I  long  to  see  the  blue  flower ; 
it  is  continually  in  my  mind,  and  I  can  think  of  nothing 
else."  Heinrich  falls  asleep,  and  has  a  vision  of  a  won- 
drous cavern  and  a  fountain,  beside  which  grows  a  tall, 
light  blue  flower  that  bends  towards  him,  the  petals  show- 
ing "  like  a  blue  spreading  ruff  in  which  hovered  a  lovely 
face."     This  blue  flower,  says  Carlyle,  is  poetry,  "the 


The  T^pmantic  School  in  Germany,  165 

real  object,  passion,  and  vocation  of  young  Heinrich." 
Boyesen  gives  a  subtler  interpretation.  "This  blue 
flower,"  he  says,  "  is  the  watchword  and  symbol  of  the 
school.  It  is  meant  to  symbolise  the  deep  and  nameless 
longings  of  a  poet's  soul.  Romantic  poetry  invariably 
deals  with  longing;  not  a  definite  formulated  desire  for 
some  attainable  object,  but  a  dim  mysterious  aspiration, 
a  trembling  unrest,  a  vague  sense  of  kinship  with  the 
infinite,*  a  consequent  dissatisfaction  with  every  form  of 
happiness  which  the  world  has  to  offer.  The  object  of 
the  romantic  longing,  therefore,  so  far  as  it  has  any  ob- 
ject, is  the  ideal.  .  .  .  The  blue  flower,  like  the  absolute 
ideal,  is  never  found  in  this  world ;  poets  may  at  times 
dimly  feel  its  nearness,  and  perhaps  even  catch  a  brief 
glimpse  of  it  in  some  lonely  forest  glade,  far  from  the 
haunts  of  men,  but  it  is  in  vain  to  try  to  pluck  it.  If  for 
a  moment  its  perfume  fills  the  air,  the  senses  are  intoxi- 
cated and  the  soul  swells  with  poetic  rapture."  f  It 
would  lead  us  too  far  afield  to  follow  up  the  traces  of  this 
mystical  symbolism  in  the  writings  of  our  New  England 
transcendentalists.  One  is  often  reminded  of  Novalis' 
blue  flower  in  such  a  poem  as  Emerson's  "  Forerunners," 
or  Lowell's  "Footpath,"  or  Whittier's  " Vanishers,"  or 
in  Thoreau's  little  parable  about  the  horse,  the  hound, 
and  the  dove  which  he  had  long  ago  lost  and  is  still 
seeking.  And  again  one  is  reminded  of  Tieck  when 
Thoreau  says :  "  I  had  seen  the  red  election  birds  brought 
from  their  recesses  on  my  comrades'  strings  and  fancied 
that  their  plumage  would  assume  stranger  and  more  daz- 

*  A.  W.  Schlegel  says  that  romantic  poetry  is  the  represen- 
tation {Darstellung)  of  the  infinite  through  symbols, 
f  "Novalis  and  the  Blue  Flower." 


1 66  <tA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

zling  colours  in  proportion  as  I  advanced  farther  into  the 
darkness  and  solitude  of  the  forest."  Heinrich  von 
Ofterdingen  travels  to  Augsburg  to  visit  his  grandfather, 
conversing  on  the  way  with  various  shadowy  persons,  a 
miner,  a  hermit,  an  Eastern  maiden  named  Zulma,  who 
represent  respectively,  according  to  Boyesen,  the  poetry 
of  nature,  the  poetry  of  history,  and  the  spirit  of  the 
Orient.  At  Augsburg  he  meets  the  poet  Klingsohr  (the 
personification,  perhaps,  of  poetry  in  its  full  develop- 
ment). With  his  daughter  Matilda  he  falls  in  love, 
whose  face  is  that  same  which  he  had  beheld  in  his 
vision,  encircled  by  the  petals  of  the  blue  flower.  Then 
he  has  a  dream  in  which  he  sees  Matilda  sink  and  disap- 
pear in  the  waters  of  a  river.  Then  he  encounters  her  in 
a  strange  land  and  asks  where  the  river  is.  "  Seest  thou 
not  its  blue  waves  above  us?  n  she  answers.  "  He  looked 
up  and  the  blue  river  was  flowing  softly  over  their  heads." 
"  This  image  of  Death,  and  of  the  river  being  the  sky  in 
that  other  and  eternal  country  "  * — does  it  not  once  more 
remind  us  of  the  well-known  line  in  Channing's  "A 
Poet's  Hope  "— 

"If  my  bark  sink,  'tis  to  another  sea"  ; 
or  of  Emerson's  "  Two  Rivers  " : 

"Thy  summer  voice,  Musketaquit, 
Repeats  the  music  of  the  rain, 
But  sweeter  rivers  pulsing  flit 
Through  thee,  as  thou  through  Concord  plain  "  ? 

But  transcendentalism  is  one  thing  and  romanticism  is 
another,  and  we  may  dismiss  Novalis  with  a  reminder  of 
the  fact  that  the  Journal  of  Speculative  Philosophy,  once 
published  at  Concord,  took  for  its  motto  a  sentence  from 

*  Carlyle. 


Thel^pmantic  School  in  Germany.  167 

his  "  Bliithenstaub  "  (Flower-pollen) :  "  Philosophy  can 
bake  no  bread,  but  she  can  procure  for  us  God,  freedom, 
and  immortality."  * 

Brentano  and  Von  Arnim  have  had  practically  no  influ- 
ence in  England.  Brentano's  most  popular  story  was 
translated  by  T.  W.  Appell,  under  the  title,  "  Honour, 
or  the  Story  of  the  Brave  Casper  and  the  Fair  Annerl : 
With  an  Introduction  and  Biographical  Notice"  (Lon- 
don, 1847).  The  same  story  was  rendered  into  French 
in  the  Correspondant  for  1859  ("Le  Brave  Kasperl  et  la 
Belle  Annerl ").  Three  tales  of  Arnim  were  translated 
by  The'ophile  Gautier,  as  "  Contes  Bizarres  "  (Paris,  1856). 
Arnim's  best  romance  is  "Die  Kronenwachter  "  (1817). 
Scherer  testifies  that  this  "  combined  real  knowledge  of 

e  Reformation  period  with  graphic  power  " ;  and  adds : 
"  It  was  Walter  Scott's  great  example  which,  in  the  sec- 
ond decade  of  this  century,  first  made  conscientious  faith- 
fulness and  study  of  details  the  rule  in  historical  novel- 
writing."/  Longfellow's  "German  Poets  and  Poetry" 
(1845)  includes  nothing  from  Arnim  or  Brentano.  Nor 
did  Thomas  Roscoe's  "German  Novelists"  (four  vol- 
umes), nor  George  Soane's  "  Specimens  of  German  Ro- 
mance," both  of  which  appeared  in  1826. 

The  most  popular  of  the  German  romanticists  was 
Friedrich  Baron  de  la  Motte  Fouque',  the  descendant  of 
a  family  exiled  from  France  by  the  Revocation  of  the 
Edict  of  Nantes,  and  himself  an  officer- in  the  Prussian 
army  in  the  war  of  liberation.  Fouque's  numerous  ro- 
mances, in  all  of  which  he  upholds  the  ideal  of  Christian 
knighthood,  have  been,  many  of   them,  translated   into 

*  Selections  from  Novalis  in  an  English  translation  were 
published  at  London  in  1891. 


ft 


1 68  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

English.  "Aslauga's  Knight"  appeared  in  Carlyle's 
"  Specimens  of  German  Romance  "  (1827) ;  "  Sintram," 
"  Undine,"  and  "  Der  Zauberring  "  had  been  translated 
even  earlier.  "Thiodolf  the  Icelander"  and  others  have 
also  been  current  in  English  circulating  libraries. 
Carlyle  acknowledges  that  Fouque's  notes  are  few,  and 
that  he  is  possessed  by  a  single  idea.  "  The  chapel  and 
the  tilt  yard  stand  in  the  background  or  the  foreground 
in  all  the  scenes  of  his  universe.  He  gives  us  knights, 
soft-hearted  and  strong-armed;  full  of  Christian  self- 
denial,  patience,  meekness,  and  gay,  easy  daring;  they 
stand  before  us  in  their  mild  frankness,  with  suitable 
equipment,  and  accompaniment  of  squire  and  dame.  .  .  . 
Change  of  scene  and  person  brings  little  change  of  sub- 
ject; even  when  no  chivalry  is  mentioned,  we  feel  too 
clearly  the  influence  of  its  unseen  presence.  Nor  can  it 
be  said  that  in  this  solitary  department  his  success  is  of 
the  very  highest  sort.  To  body  forth  the  spirit  of 
Christian  knighthood  in  existing  poetic  forms;  to  wed 
that  old  sentiment  to  modern  thoughts,  was  a  task  which 
he  could  not  attempt.  He  has  turned  rather  to  the  fic- 
tions and  machinery  of  former  days."  Heine  says  that 
Fouqud's  Sigurd  the  Serpent  Slayer  has  the  courage  of 
a  hundred  lions  and  the  sense  of  two  asses.  But  Fouque's 
"Undine"  (1811)  is  in  its  way  a  masterpiece  and  a 
classic.  This  story  of  the  lovely  water-sprite,  who  re- 
ceived a  soul  when  she  fell  in  love  with  the  knight,  and 
with  a  soul,  a  knowledge  of  human  sorrow,  has  a  slight 
resemblance  to  the  conception  of  Hawthorne's  "  Marble 
Faun."  Coleridge  was  greatly  fascinated  by  it.  He 
read  the  original  several  times,  and  once  the  American 
translation,  printed  at  Philadelphia.     He  said  that  it  was 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  169 

beyond  Scott,  and   that  Undine  resembled  Shakspere's 
Caliban  in  being  a  literal  creation. 

f  But  in  general  Fouque's  chivalry  romances,  when 
compared  with  Scott's,  have  much  less  vigour,  variety, 
and  dramatic  force,  though  a  higher  spirituality  and  a 
softer  sentiment.  The  Waverley  novels  are  solid  with  a 
right  materialistic  treatment.  It  was  Scott's  endeavour 
to  make  the  Middle  Ages  real.  The  people  are  there, 
as  well  as  chevaliers  and  their  ladies.  The  history  of 
the  times  is  there.  But  in  Fouque  the  Middle  Ages  be- 
come even  more  unreal,  fairy-like,  fantastic  than  they 
are  in  our  imaginations.  There  is  nothing  but  tourney- 
ing, love-making,  and  enchantment.  Compare  the  rumour 
of  the  Crusades  and  Richard  the  Lion  Heart  in  *  Der 
Zauberring  "  with  the  stalwart  flesh -an  d-blood  figures  in 
"  Ivanhoe  "  and  "  The  Talisman."!  A  wavering  moon- 
shine lies  all  over  the  world  of  the  Fouque  romances,  like 
the  magic  light  which  illumines  the  Druda's  castle  in 
"  Der  Zauberring,"  on  whose  battlements  grow  tall  white 
flowers,  and  whose  courts  are  filled  with  unearthly  music 
from  the  perpetual  revolution  of  golden  wheels.  "On 
the  romantic  side,"  wrote  Richter,  in  his  review  of 
"  L'Allemagne  "  in  the  Heidelberg  Jahrbucher  for  1815, 
"we  could  not  wish  the  Briton  to  cast  his  first  glance 
at  us ;  for  the  Briton — to  whom  nothing  is  so  poetical  as 
the  common  weal — requires  (being  used  to  the  weight  of 
gold),  even  for  a  golden  age  of  poetry,  the  thick  golden 
wing-cases  of  his  epithet-poets;  not  the  transparent  gos- 
samer wings  of  the  Romanticists ;  no  many-coloured  but- 
terfly dust;  but,  at  lowest,  flower-dust  that  will  grow  to 
something." 

Another  Spatromantiker  who  has  penetrated  to  the  Eng- 


170  aA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

lish  literary  consciousness  is  the  Swabian  Ludwig  Uhland, 
the  sweetest  lyric  poet  of  the  romantic  school.  Uhland 
studied  the  poems  of  Ossian,  the  Norse  sagas,  the  "  Nibe- 
lungenlied"  and  German  hero  legends,  the  Spanish  ro- 
mances, the  poetry  of  the  trouveres  and  the  troubadours, 
and  treated  motives  from  all  these  varied  sources.  His 
true  field,  however,  was  the  ballad,  as  Tieck's  was  the 
popular  tale ;  and  many  of  Uhland's  ballads  are  favourites 
with  English  readers,  through  excellent  translations. 
Sarah  Austin's  version  of  one  of  them  is  widely  familiar: 

"  Many  a  year  is  in  its  grave 
Since  I  crossed  this  restless  wave, "  etc. 

Longfellow  translated  three:  "The  Black  Knight," 
"  The  Luck  of  Edenhall,"  and  "  The  Castle  by  the  Sea." 
It  is  to  be  feared  that  the  last-named  belongs  to  what 
Scherer  calls  that  "  trivial  kind  of  romanticism,  full  of 
sadness  and  renunciation,  in  which  kings  and  queens  with 
crimson  mantles  and  golden  crowns,  kings'  daughters  and 
beautiful  shepherds,  harpers,  monks,  and  nuns  play  a 
great  part."  But  it  has  a  haunting  beauty,  and  a  dreamy 
melody  like  Goethe's  "Es  war  ein  Konig  in  Thule." 
The  mocking  Heine,  who  stigmatises  Fouque's  knights 
as  combinations  of  iron  and  sentimentality,  complains 
that  in  Uhland's  writings  too  "the  naive,  rude,  powerful 
tones  of  the  Middle  Ages  are  not  reproduced  with  ideal- 
ised fidelity,  but  rather  they  are  dissolved  into  a  sickly, 
sentimental  melancholy.  .  .  .  The  women  in  Uhland's 
poems  are  only  beautiful  shadows,  embodied  moonshine; 
milk  flows  in  their  veins,  and  sweet  tears  in  their  eyes, 
*>.,  tears  which  lack  salt.  If  we  compare  Uhland's 
knights  with  the  knights  in  the  old  ballads,  it  seems  to 


The  Romantic  School  in  Germany.  171 

us  as  if  the  former  were  composed  of  suits  of  leaden 
armour,  entirely  filled  with  flowers,  instead  of  flesh  and 
bones.  Hence  Uhland's  knights  are  more  pleasing  to 
delicate  nostrils  than  the  old  stalwarts,  who  wore  heavy 
iron  trousers  and  were  huge  eaters  and  still  huger  drink- 
ers." 

Upon  the  whole  it  must  be  concluded  that  this  second 
invasion  of  England  by  German  romance,  in  the  twenties 
and  early  thirties  of  the  nineteenth  century,  made  a  lesser 
impression  than  the  first  irruption  in,  say,  1795  to  1810, 
in  the  days  of  Burger  and  "Gotz,"  and  "The  Robbers," 
and  Monk  Lewis  and  the  youthful  Scott.  And  the  rea- 
son is  not  far  to  seek.  The  newcomers  found  England 
in  possession  of  a  native  romanticism  of  a  very  robust 
type,  by  the  side  of  which  the  imported  article  showed 
like  a  delicate  exotic.  Carlyle  affirms  that  Madame  de 
StaeTs  book  was  the  precursor  of  whatever  acquaintance 
with  German  literature  exists  in  England.  He  himself 
worked  valiantly  to  extend  that  acquaintance  by  his  arti- 
cles in  the  Edinburgh  and  Foreign  Review,  and  by  his 
translations  from  German  romance.  But  he  found  among 
English  readers  an  invincible  prejudice  against  German 
mysticism  and  German  sentimentality.  The  romantic 
chiaroscuro,  which  puzzled  Southey  even  in  "The  An- 
cient Mariner,"  became  dimmest  twilight  in  Tieck's 
"Mahrchen"  and  midnight  darkness  in  the  visionary 
Novalis.  The  Weichheit,  Wehmuth,  and  Sehnsucht  nach 
der  Unendlichkeit  of  the  German  romanticists  were  moods 
not  altogether  unfamiliar  in  English  poetry.  "  Now  stirs 
the  feeling  infinite,"  sings  Byron. 

"  Now  more  than  ever  seems  it  rich  to  die, 
To  cease  upon  the  midnight  with  no  pain, " 


172  zA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

cries  Keats.  But  when  Novalis,  in  his  Todessehnsucht, 
exclaims,  "  Death  is  the  romance  of  life,"  the  sentiment 
has  an  alien  sound.  There  was  something  mutually  re- 
pellent between  the  more  typical  phases  of  English  and 
German  romanticism.  Tieck  and  the  Schlegels,  we 
know,  cared  little  for  Scott.  We  are  told  that  Scott  read 
the  Zeitung  fur  Einsiedler,  but  we  are  not  told  what  he 
thought  of  it.  Perhaps  romanticism,  like  transcendental- 
ism, found  a  more  congenial  soil  in  New  than  in  Old 
England.  Longfellow  spent  the  winter  of  1835-36  in 
Heidelberg,  calling  on  A.  W.  Schlegel  at  Bonn,  on  his 
way  thither.  "Hyperion  "  (1839)  *s  saturated  with  Ger- 
man romance.  Its  hero,  Paul  Flemming,  knew  "  Des 
Knaben  Wunderhorn  "  almost  by  heart.  No  other  Ger- 
man book  had  ever  exercised  such  "wild  and  magic  in- 
fluence upon  his  imagination." 


CHAPTER   V. 
Ubc  IRomantfc  Movement  in  jfrance.* 

French  romanticism  had  aspects  of  its  own  which  dis- 
tinguished it  from  the  English  and  the  German  alike.  It 
differed  from  the  former  and  agreed  with  the  latter  in 
being  organised.  In  France,  as  in  Germany,  there  was 
a  romantic  school^  whose  members  were  united  by  com- 
mon literary  principles  and  by  personal  association. 
There  were  sharply  defined  and  hostile  factions  of  classics 
and  romantics,  with  party  cries,  watchwords,  and  shibbo- 
leths; a  propaganda  carried  on  and  a  polemic  waged  in 
pamphlets,  prefaces,  and  critical  journals.  Above  all 
there  was  a  leader.  (Walter  Scott  was  the  great  romancer 
of  Europe,  but  he  was  never  the  head  of  a  school  in  his 
own  country  in  the  sense  in  which  Victor  Hugo  was  in 
France,  or  even  in  the  sense  in  which  the  Schlegels  were 
in  Germany.     Scott  had  imitators,  but  Hugo  had  disci- 


ples. I 


*  It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  say  that  no  full-length  picture 
of  the  French  romantic  movement  is  attempted  in  this  chap- 
ter, but  only  such  a  sketch  as  should  serve  to  illustrate  its  re- 
lation to  English  romanticism.  For  the  history  of  the  move- 
ment, besides  the  authorities  quoted  or  referred  to  in  the  text, 
I  have  relied  principally  upon  the  following :  Petit  de  Julle- 
ville:  "Histoire  de  la  Litterature  Franchise, "  Tome  vii., 
Paris,  1899.  Brunetiere :  "  Manual  of  the  History  of  French 
Literature"  (authorized  translation),  New  York,  1898.  L. 
Bertrand:  "La  Fin  du  Classicisme,"  Paris,  1897.  Adolphe 
Jullien:  "Le  Romantisme  et  L'Editeur  Renduel,"  Paris, 
1897.     I  have  also  read  somewhat  widely,  though  not  exhaus- 

173 

Of  T.HB 


174  zrf  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

One  point  in  which  the  French  movement  differed  from 
both  the  English  and  the  German  was  in  the  suddenness 
and  violence  of  the  outbreak.  It  was  not  so  much  a 
gradual  development  as  a  revolution,  an  explosion.  The 
reason  of  this  is  to  be  found  in  the  firmer  hold  which 
academic  tradition  had  in  France,  the  fountainhead  of 
eighteenth-century  classicism.  Romanticism  had  a  spe- 
cial work  to  do  in  the  land  of  literary  convention  in  as- 
serting the  freedom  of  art  and  the  unity  of  art  and  life. 
Everything  that  is  in  life,  said  Hugo,  is,  or  has  a  right 
to  be  in  art.  The  French,  in  political  and  social  matters 
the  most  revolutionary  people  of  Europe,  were  the  most 
conservative  in  matters  of  taste.  The  Revolution  even 
intensified  the  reigning  classicism  by  giving  it  a  republi- 
can turn.  The  Jacobin  orators  appealed  constantly  to 
the  examples  of  the  Greek  and  Roman  democracies.  The 
Goddess  of  Reason  was  enthroned  in  place  of  God.  Sun- 
day was  abolished,  and  the  names  of  the  months  and  of 
the  days  of  the  week  were  changed.  Dress  under  the 
Directory  was  patterned  on  antique  modes — the  liberty 
cap  was  Phrygian — and  children  born  under  the  Repub- 

tively,  in  the  writings  of  the  French  romantics  themselves, 
including  Hugo's  early  poems  and  most  of  his  dramas  and 
romances;  Nodier's  "Contes  en  prose  et  en  verse  "  ;  nearly 
all  of  Musset'  s  works  in  prose  and  verse  ;  ditto  of  Theophile 
Gautier's;  Stendhal's  "La  Chartreuse  de  Parme,"  "Le 
Rouge  et  le  Noir,"  "Racine  et  Shakespeare, "  "Lord  Byron 
en  Italie,"  etc.;  Vigny's  " Chatterton, "  "Cinq-Mars,"  and 
many  of  his  Scriptural  poems;  Balzac's  "Les  Chouans " : 
Merimee's  "Chronique  de  Charles  IX.,"  and  most  of  his 
"  Nouvelles "  ;  Chateaubriand' s  "  Le  Genie  du  Christianisme  "  ; 
some  of  Lamartine's  "Meditations"  ;  most  of  George  Sand's 
novels,  and  a  number  of  Dumas'  ;  many  of  Sainte-Beuve's 
critical  writings ;  and  the  miscellanies  of  Gerard  de  Nerval 
(Labrunie) .  Of  many  of  these,  of  course,  no  direct  use  or 
mention  is  made  in  the  present  chapter. 


The  Romantic  (Movement  in  France.  175 

lie  were  named  after  Roman  patriots,  Brutus,  Cassius,  etc. 
The  great  painter  of  the  Revolution  was  David,*  who 
painted  his  subjects  in  togas,  with  backgrounds  of  Greek 
temples.  Voltaire's  classicism  was  monarchical  and  held 
to  the  Louis  XIV.  tradition;  David's  was  republican. 
And  yet  the  recognised  formulae  of  taste  and  criticism 
were  the  same  in  1800  as  in  1775,  or  in  1675. 

A  second  distinction  of  the  French  romanticism  was 
its  local  concentration  at  Paris.  The  centripetal  forces 
have  always  been  greater  in  France  than  in  England  and 
Germany.  The  earlier  group  of  German  Romantikervtz.s, 
indeed,  as  we  have  seen,  united  for  a  time  at  Jena  and 
Berlin;  and  the  Spatromantiker  at  Heidelberg.  But  this 
was  dispersion  itself  as  compared  with  the  intense  focus- 
sing of  intellectual  rays  from  every  quarter  of  France 
upon  the  capital.  In  England,  I  hardly  need  repeat, 
there  was  next  to  no  cohesion  at  all  between  the  widely 
scattered  men  of  letters  whose  work  exhibited  romantic 
traits.  • 

In  one  particular  the  French  movement  resembled  the 
English  more  nearly  than  the  German.  It  kept  itself 
almost  entirely  within  the  domain  of  art,  and  did  not 
carry  out  its  principles  with  German  thoroughness  and 
consistency  into  politics  and  religion.  It  made  no  efforts 
towards  a  practical  restoration  of  the  Middle  Ages.  At 
the  beginning,  indeed,  French  romanticism  exhibited 
something  analogous  to  the  Toryism  of  Scott,  and  the 
reactionary  Junkerism  and  neo-Catholicism  of  the  Schle- 

*  "II  a  pour  l'art  du  moyen  age,  un  mepris  voisin  de  la  de- 
mence  et  de  la  frenesie.  .  .  .  Voir  le  discours  ou  il  propose  de 
mutiler  les  statues  des  rois  de  la  facade  de  Notre-Dame,  pour 
en  former  un  piedestal  a  la  statue  du  peuple  frangais."  Ber- 
trand :  "La  Fin  du  Classicisme,"  pp.  302-3  and  note. 


176  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

gels.  Chateaubriand  in  his  "Genie  du  Christianisme " 
attempted  a  sort  of  aesthetic  revival  of  Catholic  Christian- 
ity, which  had  suffered  so  heavily  by  the  deistic  teachings 
of  the  last  century  and  the  atheism  of  the  Revolution. 
Victor  Hugo  began  in  his  "Odes  et  Ballades"  (1822) 
as  an  enthusiastic  adherent  of  monarchy  and  the  church. 
"L'histoire  des  hommes,"  he  wrote,  "ne  presente  de 
poe'sie  que  jugee  du  haut  des  idees  monarch iques  et  re- 
ligieuses."  But  he  advanced  quite  rapidly  towards  liber- 
alism both  in  politics  and  religion.  And  of  the  young 
men  who  surrounded  him,  like  Gautier,  Labrunie,  Sainte- 
Beuve,  Musset,  De  Vigny,  and  others,  it  can  only  be  af- 
firmed that  they  were  legitimist  or  republican,  Catholic 
or  agnostic,  just  as  it  happened  and  without  affecting  their 
fidelity  to  the  literary  canons  of  the  new  school.*  The 
German  romanticism  was  philosophical ;  the  French  was 
artistic  and  social.  The  Parisian  ateliers  as  well  as  the 
Parisian  salons  were  nuclei  of  revolt  against  classical 
traditions.  "  This  intermixture  of  art  with  poetry,"  says 
Gautier,f  "  was  and  remains  one  of  the  characteristic 
marks  of  the  new  school,  and  enables  us  to  understand 
why  its  earliest  recruits  were  found  more  among  artists 
than  among  men  of  letters.  A  multitude  of  objects, 
images,  comparisons,  which  were  believed  to  be  irreduci- 
ble to  words,  entered  into  the  language  and  have  stayed 
there.  The  sphere  of  literature  was  enlarged,  and  now 
includes  the  sphere  of  art  in  its  measureless  circle." 
"  At  that  time  painting  and  poetry  fraternised.  The  art- 
ists  read   the  poets   and  the  poets  visited  the  artists. 

*  But  see,  for  the  Catholic  reaction  in  France,  the  writings 
of  Joseph  de  Maistre,  especially  "  Du  Pape  "  (1819). 
f  "Histoire  du  Romantisme"  (1874). 


The  l&mantic  {Movement  in  France.  177 

Shakspere,  Dante,  Goethe,  Lord  Byron,  and  Walter  Scott 
were  to  be  found  in  the  studio  as  in  the  study.  There 
were  as  many  splotches  of  colour  as  of  ink  on  the  mar- 
gins of  those  beautiful  volumes  that  were  so  incessantly 
thumbed.  Imaginations,  already  greatly  excited  by  them- 
selves, were  heated  to  excess  by  the  reading  of  those  for- 
eign writings  of  a  colouring  so  rich,  of  a  fancy  so  free 
and  so  strong.  Enthusiasm  mounted  to  delirium.  It 
seemed  as  if  we  had  discovered  poetry,  and  that  was  in- 
deed the  truth.  Now  that  this  fine  flame  has  cooled  and 
that  the  positive-minded  generation  which  possesses  the 
world  is  preoccupied  with  other  ideas,  one  cannot  imagine 
what  dizziness,  what  kblouissement  was  produced  in  us  by 
such  and  such  a  picture  or  poem,  which  people  nowadays 
are  satisfied  to  approve  by  a  slight  nod  of  the  head. 
It  was  so  new,  so  unexpected,  so  lively,  so  glowing!  "  * 

The  romantic  school  in  France  had  not  only  its  poets, 
dramatists,  and  critics,  but  its  painters,  architects,  sculp- 
tors, musical  composers,  and  actors.  The  romantic  artist 
par  excellence  was  Eugene  Delacroix,  the  painter  of  "  The 
Crusaders  Entering  Jerusalem.  "The  Greeks  and  Ro- 
mans had  been  so  abused  by  the  decadent  school  of 
David  that  they  fell  into  complete  disrepute  at  this  time. 
Delacroix's  first  manner  was  purely  romantic,  that  is  to 
say,  he  borrowed  nothing  from  the  recollections  or  the 
forms  of  the  antique.  The  subjects  that  he  treated  were 
relatively  modern,  taken  from  the  history  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  from  Dante,  Shakspere,  Goethe,  Lord  Byron,  or 
Walter  Scott."  He  painted  "Hamlet,"  "The  Boat  of 
Dante,"  "Tasso  in  Bedlam,"  "Marino  Faliero,"  "The 
Death  of  Sardanapalus,"  "The  Combat  of  the  Giaour  and 
*  Ibid.,  210. 


178  <tA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

the  Pasha,"  "The  Massacre  of  the  Bishop  of  Liege,"  and 
similar  subjects.  Goethe  in  his  conversations  with  Eck- 
erman  expressed  great  admiration  of  Delacroix's  inter- 
pretations of  scenes  in  "  Faust "  (the  brawl  in  Auerbach's 
cellar,  and  the  midnight  ride  of  Faust  and  Mephistopheles 
to  deliver  Margaret  from  prison).  Goethe  hoped  that 
the  French  artist  would  go  on  and  reproduce  the  whole 
of  "  Faust,"  and  especially  the  sorceress'  kitchen  and  the 
scenes  on  the  Brocken.  Other  painters  of  the  romantic 
school  were  Camille  Roqueplan,  who  treated  motives 
drawn  from  "  The  Antiquary  "  and  other  novels  of  Walter 
Scott;*  and  Eugene  Deveria,  whose  "Birth  of  Henry 
IV.,"  executed  in  1827,  when  the  artist  was  only  twenty- 
two  years  of  age,  was  a  masterpiece  of  colouring  and 
composition.  The  house  of  the  Deveria  brothers  was 
one  of  the  rallying  points  of  the  Parisian  romanticists. 
And  then  there  was  Louis  Boulanger,  who  painted  "  Ma- 
zeppa  "  and  "  The  Witches'  Sabbath  "  ("  La  Ronde  du 
Sabbat "  f )  ;  and  the  water-colour  painter  and  engraver, 
Celestin  Nanteuil,  who  furnished  innumerable  designs 
for  vignettes,  frontispieces,  and  book  illustrations  to  the 
writers  of  the  romantic  school. 

"  Of  all  the  arts,"  says  Gautier,  "  the  one  that  lends 
itself  least  to  the  expression  of  the  romantic  idea  is  cer- 
tainly sculpture.  It  seems  to  have  received  from  antiq- 
uity its  definitive  form.  .  .  .  What  can  the  statuary  art 
do  without  the  gods  and  heroes  of  mythology  who  furnish 
it  with   plausible   pretexts  for  the  nude,  and  for  such 

*  Heine  counted,  in  the  Salon  of  1831,  more  than  thirty  pic- 
tures inspired  by  Scott. 

f  Also  "Le  Roi  Lear"  (Salon  of  1836)  and  "La  Procession 
duPapedes  Fous"  (aquarelle)  for  Hugo's  " Notre-Dame  de 
Paris." 


Tbe  T{omantic  {Movement  in  France.  179 

drapery  as  it  needs ;  things  which  romanticism  prescribes, 
or  did  at  least  prescribe  at  that  time  of  its  first  fervour? 
Every  sculptor  is  of  necessity  a  classic."  *  Nevertheless, 
he  says  that  the  romantic  school  was  not  quite  unpro- 
vided of  sculptors.  "  In  our  inner  circle  (ctnacle),  Jehan 
du  Seigneur  represented  this  art,  austere  and  rebellious 
to  the  fancy.  .  .  .  Jehan  du  Seigneur — let  us  leave  in  his 
name  of  Jean  this  mediaeval  h  which  made  him  so  happy 
and  made  him  believe  that  he  wore  the  apron  of  Ervein 
of  Steinbach  at  work  on  the  sculptures  of  Strasburg  min- 
ster." Gautier  mentions  among  the  productions  of  this 
Gothic-minded  statuary  an  "  Orlando  Furioso,"  a  bust  of 
Victor  Hugo,  and  a  group  from  the  latter's  romance, 
"  Notre  Dame  de  Paris,"  the  gipsy  girl  Esmeralda  giving 
a  drink  to  the  humpback  Quasimodo.  It  was  the  en- 
deavour of  the  new  school,  in  the  arts  of  design  as  well 
as  in  literature,  to  introduce  colour,  novelty,  picturesque- 
ness,  character.  They  studied  the  great  Venetian  and 
Flemish  colourists,  neglected  under  the  reign  of  David, 
and  "in  the  first  moments  of  their  fury  against  le poncif 
dassique,  they  seemed  to  have  adopted  the  theory  of  art 
of  the  witches  in  *  Macbeth' — Fair  is  foul  and  foul  is 
fair  " ;  f  i.e.,  they  neglected  a  traditional  beauty  in  favour 
of  the  characteristic.  "  They  sought  the  true,  the  new,  the 
picturesque  perhaps  more  than  the  ideal ;  but  this  re- 
action was  certainly  permissible  after  so  many  Ajaxes, 
Achilleses,  and  Philocteteses." 

It  is  not  quite  so  easy  to  understand  what  is  meant  by 
romanticism    in  music  as   in   literature.      But    Gautier 

*  Recall  Schlegel's  saying  that  the  genius  of  the  classic 
drama  was  plastic  and  that  of  the  romantic  picturesque, 
f  Gautier,  192. 


180  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

names  a  number  of  composers  as  adhering  to  the  roman- 
tic school,  among  others,  Hippolyte  Monpon,  who  set  to 
music  "the  leaping  metres,  the  echo- rimes,  the  Gothic 
counter-points  of  Hugo's  ■  Odes  et  Ballades '  and  songs 
like  Musset's  '  L'Andalouse ' — 

*  Avez  vous  vu  dans  Barcelone, ' 

He  believed  like  us  in  serenades,  alcaldes,  mantillas, 
castinets;  in  all  that  Italy  and  that  Spain,  a  trifle  con- 
ventional, which  was  brought  into  fashion  by  the  author 
of  '  Don  Paez,'  of  ■  Portia/  and  of  the  ■  Marchioness  of 
Amalgui,'  .  .  .  'Gastibelza,  the  Man  with  the  Cara- 
bine,' and  that  guitar,  so  profoundly  Spanish,  of  Victor 
Hugo,  had  inspired  Monpon  with  a  savage,  plaintive  air, 
of  a  strange  character,  which  long  remained  popular,  and 
which  no  romanticist — if  any  such  is  left — has  forgotten." 
A  greater  name  than  Monpon  was  Hector  Berlioz,  the 
composer  of  "  Romeo  and  Juliette  "  and  "  The  Damnation 
of  Faust."  Gautier  says  that  Berlioz  represented  the  ro- 
mantic idea  in  music,  by  virtue  of  his  horror  of  common 
formulae,  his  breaking  away  from  old  models,  the  complex 
richness  of  his  orchestration,  his  fidelity  to  local  colour 
(whatever  that  may  mean  in  music),  his  desire  to  make 
his  art  express  what  it  had  never  expressed  before,  "  the 
tumultuous  and  Shaksperian  depth  of  the  passions,  rev- 
eries amorous  or  melancholy,  the  longings  and  demands 
of  the  soul,  the  indefinite  and  mysterious  feelings  which 
words  cannot  render."  Berlioz  was  a  passionate  lover  of 
German  music  and  of  the  writings  of  Shakspere,  Goethe, 
and  Scott.  He  composed  overtures  to  "  Waverley," 
"  King  Lear,"  and  "  Rob  Roy  " ;  a  cantata  on  "  Sardan- 
apalus,"  and  music  for  the  ghost  scene  in  "  Hamlet "  and 


The  Romantic  (Movement  in  France.  181 

for  Goethe's  ballad,  "  The  Fisher."  He  married  an  Eng- 
lish actress  whom  he  had  seen  in  the  parts  of  Ophelia, 
Portia,  and  Cordelia.  Berlioz  en  revanche  was  better 
appreciated  in  Germany  than  in  France,  where  he  was 
generally  considered  mad;  where  his  "  Symphonie  fan- 
tastique"  produced  an  effect  analogous  to  that  of  the 
first  pieces  of  Richard  Wagner;  and  where  "the  sympho- 
nies of  Beethoven  were  still  thought  barbarous,  and  pro- 
nounced by  the  classicists  not  to  be  music,  any  more  than 
the  verses  of  Victor  Hugo  were  poetry,  or  the  pictures  of 
Delacroix  painting."  And  finally  there  were  actors  and 
actresses  who  came  to  fill  their  roles  in  the  new  roman- 
tic dramas,  of  whom  I  need  mention  only  Madame  Dor- 
val,  who  took  the  part  of  Hugo's  Marion  Delorme.  What 
Gautier  tells  us  of  her  is  significant  of  the  art  that  she 
interpreted;  that  her  acting  was  by  sympathy,  rather  than 
calculation;  that  it  was  intensely  emotional;  that  she 
owed  nothing  to  tradition ;  her  tradition  was  essentially 
modern,  dramatic  rather  than  tragic* 

Romanticism  in  France  was,  in  a  more  special  sense 
than  in  Germany  and  England,  an  effort  for  freedom, 
passion,  originality,  as  against  rule,  authority,  conven- 
tion. "Romanticism,"  says  Victor  Hugo,f  "so  many 
times  poorly  defined,  is  nothing  else  than  liberalism  in 
literature.  .  .  .  Literary  liberty  is  the  child  of  political 
liberty.  .  .  .  After  so  many  great  things  which  our  fa- 
thers have  done  and  which  we  have  witnessed,  here  we  are, 
issued  forth  from  old  forms  of  society;  why  should  we 
not  issue  out  of  the  old  forms  of  poetry?     A  new  people, 

*  This  is  a  distinction  more  French  than  English :  la  trag- 
idle  vs.  le  drame. 

\  Preface  to  "Hernani." 


1 82  zA  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

a  new  art.  While  admiring  the  literature  of  Louis  XIV., 
so  well  adapted  to  his  monarchy,  France  will  know  how  to 
have  its  own- literature,  peculiar,  personal,  and  national — 
this  actual  France,  this  France  of  the  nineteenth  century 
to  which  Mirabeau  has  given  its  freedom  and  Napoleon 
its  power."  And  again  :  *  "  What  I  have  been  pleading 
for  is  the  liberty  of  art  as  against  the  despotism  of  sys- 
tems, codes,  and  rules.  It  is  my  habit  to  follow  at  all 
hazards  what  I  take  for  inspiration,  and  to  change  the 
mould  as  often  as  I  change  the  composition.  Dogmatism 
in  the  arts  is  what  I  avoid  above  all  things.  God  forbid 
that  I  should  aspire  to  be  of  the  number  of  those,  either 
romantics  or  classics,  who  make  works  according  to  their 
system  ;  who  condemn  themselves  never  to  have  more  than 
one  form  in  mind,  to  always  be  proving  something,  to 
follow  any  other  laws  than  those  of  their  organization 
and  of  their  nature.  The  artificial  work  of  such  men  as 
those,  whatever  talents  they  may  possess,  does  not  exist  for 
art.  It  is  a  theory,  not  a  poetry."  It  is  manifest  that  a 
literary  reform  undertaken  in  this  spirit  would  not  long 
consent  to  lend  itself  to  the  purposes  of  political  or 
religious  reaction,  or  to  limit  itself  to  any  single  influence 
like  mediaevalism,  but  would  strike  out  freely  in  a  multi- 
tude of  directions ;  would  invent  new  forms  and  adapt  old 
ones  to  its  material ;  and  would  become  more  and  more 
modern,  various,  and  progressive.  And  such,  in  fact, 
was  the  history  of  Victor  Hugo's  intellectual  develop- 
ment and  of  the  whole  literary  movement  in  France  which 
began  with  him  and  with  De  Stendhal  (Henri  Beyle). 
This  assertion  of  the  freedom  of  the  individual  artist  was 
naturally  accompanied  with  certain  extravagances.  "  To 
*  Preface  to  "  Cromwell." 


The  %pmantic  [Movement  in  France.  183 

develop  freely  all  the  caprices  of  thought,"  says  Gautier,* 
"  even  if  they  shocked  taste,  convention,  and  rule;  to  hate 
and  repel  to  the  utmost  what  Horace  calls  the  prqfanum 
vulgus,  and  what  the  moustached  and  hairy  rapins  call 
grocers,  philistines,  or  bourgeois;  to  celebrate  love  with 
warmth  enough  to  burn  the  paper  (that  they  wrote  on) ; 
to  set  it  up  as  the  only  end  and  only  means  of  happiness; 
to  sanctify  and  deify  art,  regarded  as  a  second  creator; 
such  are  the  donn'ees  of  the  programme  which  each  sought 
to  realise  according  to  his  strength;  the  ideal  and  the 
secret  postulations  of  the  young  romanticists." 

Inasmuch  as  the  French  romantic  school,  even  more 
than  the  English  and  the  German,  was  a  breach  with  tradi- 
tion and  an  insurrection  against  existing  conditions,  it  will 
be  well  to  notice  briefly  what  the  particular  situation  was 
which  the  romanticists  in  France  confronted.  "To  un- 
derstand what  this  movement  was  and  what  it  did,"  says 
Saintsbury,f  "we  must  point  out  more  precisely  what 
were  the  faults  of  the  older  literature,  and  especially  of 
the  literature  of  the  late  eighteenth  century.  They  were, 
in  the  first  place,  an  extremely  impoverished  vocabulary, 
no  recourse  being  had  to  the  older  tongue  for  picturesque 
archaisms,  and  little  welcome  being  given  to  new  phrases, 
however  appropriate  and  distinct.  In  the  second  place*r 
the  adoption,  especially  in  poetry,  of  an  exceedingly  con- 
ventional method  of  speech,  describing  everything  where 
possible  by  an  elaborate  periphrasis,  and  avoiding  di- 
rect and  simple  terms.  Thirdly,  in  all  forms  of  litera- 
ture, but  especially  in  poetry  and  drama,  the  accept- 
ance for   almost  every  kind   of  work   of   cut-and-drie4 

*  "  Histoire  du  Romantisme, "  p.  64. 

f  "Primer  of  French  Literature,"  p.  115. 


1 84  zA  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

patterns,*  to  which  it  was  bound  to  conform.  We  have 
already  pointed  out  that  this  had  all  but  killed  the  tragic 
drama,  and  it  was  nearly  as  bad  in  the  various  accepted 
forms  of  poetry,  such  as  fables,  epistles,  odes,  etc.  Each 
piece  was  expected  to  resemble  something  else,  and  origi- 
nality was  regarded  as  a  mark  of  bad  taste  and  insufficient 
culture.  Fourthly,  the  submission  to  a  very  limited  and 
very  arbitrary  system  of  versification,  adapted  only  to  the 
production  of  tragic  alexandrines,  and  limiting  even  that 
form  of  verse  to  one  monotonous  model.  Lastly,  the 
limitation  of  the  subject  to  be  treated  to  a  very  few 
classes  and  kinds."  If  to  this  description  be  added  a 
paragraph  from  Gautier's  "  Histoire  du  Romantisme,"  we 
shall  have  a  sufficient  idea  of  the  condition  of  French 
literature  and  art  before  the  appearance  of  Victor  Hugo's 
"Odes  et  Ballades"  (1826).  "One  cannot  imagine  to 
what  a  degree  of  insignificance  and  paleness  literature 
had  come.  Painting  was  not  much  better.  The  last 
pupils  of  David  were  spreading  their  wishy washy  colours 
over  the  old  Graeco-Roman  patterns.  The  classicists 
found  that  perfectly  beautiful;  but  in  the  presence  of 
these  masterpieces,  their  admiration  could  not  keep  them 
from  putting  their  hands  before  their  mouths  to  cover  a 
yawn ;  a  circumstance,  however,  that  failed  to  make  them 
any  more  indulgent  to  the  artists  of  the  new  school, 
whom  they  called  tattooed  savages  and  accused  of  paint- 
ing with  a  drunken  broom."  One  is  reminded  by  Mr. 
Saintsbury's  summary  of  many  features  which  we  have 
observed  in  the  English  academicism  of  the  eighteenth 

*  One  of  the  principles  of  the  romanticists  was  the  melange 
des  genres,  whereby  the  old  lines  between  tragedy  and  com- 
edy, e.g.,  were  broken  down,  lyricism  admitted  into  the 
drama,  etc. 


The  Romantic  (Movement  in  France.  185 

century;  the  impoverished  vocabulary,  e.g.,  which  makes 
itself  evident  in  the  annotations  on  the  text  of  Spenser 
and  other  old  authors;  the  horror  of  common  terms,  and 
the  constant  abuse  of  the  periphrasis — the  "gelid  cis- 
tern," the  " stercoraceous  heap,"  the  "spiculated  pal- 
ings," and  the  "  shining  leather  that  encased  the  limb." 
And  the  heroic  couplet  in  English  usage  corresponds  very 
closely  to  the  French  alexandrine.  In  their  dissatisfac- 
tion with  the  paleness  and  vagueness  of  the  old  poetic 
diction,  and  the  monotony  of  the  classical  verse,  the  new 
school  innovated  boldly,  introducing  archaisms,  neolo- 
gisms, and  all  kinds  of  exotic  words  and  popular  locutions, 
even  argot  ox  Parisian  slang;  and  trying  metrical  experi- 
ments of  many  sorts.  Gautier  mentions  in  particular  one 
The'ophile  Dondey  (who,  after  the  fashion  of  the  school, 
anagrammatised  his  name  into  Philothee  O'Neddy)  as  pre- 
senting this  caracfere  (Toutrance  et  de  tension.  "  The  word 
paroxyste,  employed  for  the  first  time  by  Nestor  Roque- 
plan,  seems  to  have  been  invented  with  an  application  to 
Philothee.  Everything  is  pousse  in  tone,  high-coloured, 
violent,  carried  to  the  utmost  limits  of  expression,  of  an 
aggressive  originality,  almost  dripping  with  the  unheard- 
of  (ruissilant  (Tinouisme) ;  but  back  of  the  double-horned 
paradoxes,  sophistical  maxims,  incoherent  metaphors, 
swoln  hyperboles,  and  words  six  feet  long,  are  the  poetic 
feeling  of  the  time  and  the  harmony  of  rhythm."  One 
hears  much  in  the  critical  writings  of  that  period,  of  the 
mot  propre,  the  vers  libre,  and  the  rime  brisk.  It  was  in 
tragedy  especially  that  the  periphrasis  reigned  most 
tyrannically,  and  that  the  introduction  of  the  mot  propre, 
i.e.,  of  terms  that  were  precise,  concrete,  familiar,  tech- 
nical even,  if  needful,  horrified  the  classicists.     It  was 


1 86  zA  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

beneath  the  dignity  of  the  muse — the  elegant  muse  of  the 
Abbd  Delille — Hugo  tells  us,  to  speak  naturally.  "  She 
underlines,"  in  sign  of  disapprobation,  "the  old  Cor- 
neille  for  his  way  of  saying  crudely 

1  Ah,  ne  me  brouillez  pas  avec  la  republique. ' 
She  still  has  heavy  on  her  heart  his  Tout  beau,  monsieur. 
And  many  a  seigneur  and  many  a  madame  was  needed  to 
make  her  forgive  our  admirable  Racine  his  chiens  so 
monosyllabic.  .  .  .  History  in  her  eyes  is  in  bad  tone 
and  taste.  How,  for  example,  can  kings  and  queens  who 
swear  be  tolerated?  They  must  be  elevated  from  their 
royal  dignity  to  the  dignity  of  tragedy.  ...  It  is  thus 
that  the  king  of  the  people  (Henri  IV.)  polished  by  M. 
Legouve',  has  seen  his  ventre-saint-gris  shamefully  driven 
from  his  mouth  by  two  sentences,  and  has  been  reduced, 
like  the  young  girl  in  the  story,  to  let  nothing  fall  from 
this  royal  mouth,  but  pearls,  rubies,  and  sapphires — all  of 
them  false,  to  say  the  truth."  It  seems  incredible  to  an 
Englishman,  but  it  is  nevertheless  true  that  at  the  first 
representations  of  "Hernani"  in  1830,  the  simple  ques- 
tion and  answer 

11  Est  il  minuit? — Minuit  bientot " 
raised  a  tempest  of  hisses  and  applause,  and  that  the  op- 
posing factions  of  classics  and  romantics  "fought  three 
days  over  this  hemistich.  It  was  thought  trivial,  famil- 
iar, out  of  place;  a  king  asks  what  time  it  is  like  a  com- 
mon citizen,  and  is  answered,  as  if  he  were  a  farmer, 
midnight.     Well  done !     Now  if  he  had  only  used  some 

fine  periphrasis,  e.g. : 

l'heure 

Atteindra  bientot  sa  derniere  demeure.* 

♦Stendhal,  writing  in  1823  ("Racine  et  Shakspere"),  com- 


The  %omantic  {Movement  in  France.  187 

If  they  could  not  away  with  definite  words  in  the  verse, 
they  endured  very  impatiently,  too,  epithets,  metaphors, 
comparisons,  poetic  words — lyricism,  in  short;  those 
swift  escapes  into  nature,  those  soarings  of  the  soul  above 
the  situation,  those  openings  of  poetry  athwart  drama,  so 
frequent  in  Shakspere,  Calderon,  and  Goethe,  so  rare  in 
our  great  authors  of  the  eighteenth  century."  Gautier 
gives,  as  one  reason  for  the  adherence  of  so  many  art- 
ists to  the  romantic  school,  the  circumstance  that,  being  ac- 
customed to  a  language  freely  intermixed  with  technical 
terms,  the  motpropre  had  nothing  shocking  for  them ;  while 
their  special  education  as  artists  having  put  them  into  inti- 
mate relation  with  nature,  "  they  were  prepared  to  feel  the 
imagery  and  colours  of  the  new  poetry  and  were  not  at 
all  repelled  by  the  precise  and  picturesque  details  so  dis- 
agreeable to  the  classicists.  .  .  .  You  cannot  imagine 
the  storms  that  broke  out  in  the  parterre  of  the  Theatre 
Francois,   when   the   *  Moor   of  Venice,'   translated   by 

plains  that  "it  will  soon  be  thought  bad  form  to  say,  on  the 
French  stage,  '  Fermez  cette  fenetre'  [window]:  we  shall 
have  to  say,  '  Fermez  cette  croisee  '  [casement] .  Two-thirds 
of  the  words  used  in  the  parlours  of  the  best  people  (du  meil- 
leur  ton)  cannot  be  reproduced  in  the  theatre.  M.  Legouve, 
in  his  tragedy  '  Henri  IV., '  could  not  make  use  of  the  patriot 
king's  finest  saying,  4 1  could  wish  that  the  poorest  peasant 
in  my  kingdom  might,  at  the  least,  have  a  chicken  in  his  pot 
of  a  Sunday. '  English  and  Italian  verse  allows  the  poet  to 
say  everything ;  and  this  good  French  word  pot  would  have 
furnished  a  touching  scene  to  Shakspere' s  humblest  pupil. 
But  la  tragidie  racinienne,  with  its  style  noble  and  its  arti- 
ficial dignity,  has  to  put  it  thus, — in  four  alexandrines : 

"'  Je  veux  enfin  qu'au  jour  marque  pour  le  repos, 
L'hote  laborieux  des  modestes  hameaux, 
Sur  sa  table  moins  humble,  ait,  par  ma  bienfaisance, 
Quelques-uns  de  ces  mets  reserves  a  l'aisance.'" 

It  was  Stendhal  (whose  real  name  was  Henri  Beyle)   who 
said  that  Paris  needed  a  chain  of  mountains  on  its  horizon. 


1 88  <sA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Alfred  de  Vigny,  grinding  his  teeth,  reiterated  his  de- 
mands for  that  handkerchief  (mouchoir)  prudently  denom- 
inated bandeau  (head-band,  fillet)  in  the  vague  Shakspere 
imitation  of  the  excellent  Ducis.  A  bell  was  called  *  the 
sounding  brass ' ;  the  sea  was  *  the  humid  element,'  or 
*  the  liquid  element,'  and  so  on.  The  professors  of  rhet- 
oric were  thunderstruck  by  the  audacity  of  Racine,  who 
in  the  4  Dream  of  Athalie'  had  spoken  of  dogs  as  dogs — 
molossi  would  have  been  better — and  they  advised  young 
poets  not  to  imitate  this  license  of  genius.  Accordingly 
the  first  poet  who  wrote  bell  {cloche)  committed  an  enor- 
mity; he  exposed  himself  to  the  risk  of  being  cut  by  his 
friends  and  excluded  from  society."  * 

As  to  the  alexandrine,  the  recognised  verse  of  French 
tragedy,  Victor  Hugo  tells  us,f  that  many  of  the  reform- 
ers, wearied  by  its  monotony,  advocated  the  writing  of 
plays  in  prose.  He  makes  a  plea,  however,  for  the  re- 
tention of  the  alexandrine,  giving  it  greater  richness  and 
suppleness  by  the  displacement  of  the  caesura,  and  the 
free  use  of  enjambement  or  run-over  lines;  just  as  Leigh 
Hunt  and  Keats  broke  up  the  couplets  of  Pope  into  a 
freer  and  looser  form  of  verse.  "  Hernani "  opened  with 
an  enjambement 

"Serait  ce  deja  lui?    C'est  bien  a  l'escalier 
Derobe." 

This  was  a  signal  of  fight — a  challenge  to  the  classicists 
— and  the  battle  began  at  once,  with  the  very  first  lines 
of  the  play.  J  In  his  dramas  Hugo  used  the  alexandrine, 
but  in  his  lyric  poems,  his  wonderful   resources  as  a 

*Gautier,  188. 

f"  Cromwell,"  1827. 

JGautier,  107. 


The  %omantic  {Movement  in  France.  189 

metrist  were  exhibited  to  the  utmost  in  the  invention  of 
the  most  bizarre,  eccentric,  and  original  verse  forms.  An 
example  of  this  is  the  poem  entitled  "  The  Djinns  "  in- 
cluded in  "Les  Orientales"  (1829).  The  coming  and 
going  of  the  flying  cohort  of  spirits  is  indicated  by  the 
crescendo  effect  of  the  verse,  beginning  with  a  stanza  in 
lines  of  two  syllables,  rising  gradually  to  the  middle 
stanza  of  the  poem  in  lines  of  ten  syllables,  and  then 
dying  away  by  exactly  graded  diminutions  to  the  final 

stanza : 

"On  doute 
La  nuit — 
J ' ecoute 
Tout  fuit, 
Tout  passe : 
L'espace 
Efface 
Le  bruit. "  * 

But  the  earlier  volume  of  "Odes  et  Ballades"  (1826) 
offers  many  instances  of  metrical  experiments  hardly  less 
ingenious.  In  "  La  Chasse  du  Burgrave  "  every  rime  is 
followed  by  an  echo  word,  alike  in  sound  but  different  in 
sense: 

"II  part,  et  Madame  Isabelle, 

Belle, 
Dit  gaiement  du  haut  des  remparts  : 

4  Pars !  * 
Tous  las  chasseurs  sont  dans  la  plaine, 

Pleine 
D'ardents  seigneurs,  de  senechaux 

Chauds. " 

The  English  reader  is  frequently  reminded  by  Hugo's 
verses  of  the  queer,  abrupt,  and  outrk  measures,  and  fan- 

*Musset's  fantastic  "Ballade  a  la  Lune, "  exaggerates  the 
romantic  so  decidedly  as  to  seem  ironical.  It  is  hard  to  say 
whether  it  is  hyperbole  or  parody.  See  Petit  de  Julleville, 
vol.  vii.,  p.  652. 


190  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

tastic  rimes  of  Robert  Browning.  Compare  with  the 
above,  e.g.,  his  "Love  among  the  Ruins." 

u  Where  the  quiet  coloured  end  of  evening  smiles 
Miles  and  miles 
On  the  solitary  pastures  where  our  sheep. 
Half  asleep,"  etc. 

From  the  fact,  already  pointed  out,  that  the  romantic 
movement  in  France  was,  more  emphatically  than  in  Eng- 
land and  Germany,  a  breach  with  the  native  literary  tra- 
dition, there  result  several  interesting  peculiarities.  The 
first  of  these  is  that  the  new  French  school,  instead  of 
fighting  the  classicists  with  weapons  drawn  from  the  old 
arsenal  of  mediaeval  France,  went  abroad  for  allies;  went 
especially  to  the  modern  writers  of  England  and  Ger- 
many. This  may  seem  strange  when  we  reflect  that 
French  literature  in  the  Middle  Ages  was  the  most  influ- 
ential in  Europe;  and  that,  from  the  old  heroic  song  of 
Roland  in  the  eleventh  century  down  to  the  very  popular 
court  allegory,  the  "  Roman  de  la  Rose  ",  in  the  fourteenth, 
and  to  the  poems  of  Villon  in  the  fifteenth,  it  afforded  a 
rich  treasure-house  of  romantic  material  in  the  shape  of 
chronicles,  chansons  de  geste,  romans  d 'aventures,  fabliaux, 
lais,  legends  of  saints,  homilies,  miracles,  songs,  farces, 
jeuspartis,  pastourelles,  ballades — of  all  the  literary  forms 
in  fact  which  were  then  cultivated.  Nor  was  this  mass 
of  work  entirely  without  influence  on  the  romanticists  of 
1830.  Theophile  Dondey,  wrote  a  poem  on  Roland; 
and  Ge'rard  de  Nerval  (Labrunie)  hunted  up  the  old  pop- 
ular songs  and  folklore  of  Touraine  and  celebrated  their 
naivete  and  truly  national  character.  Attention  was  di- 
rected to  the  Renaissance  group  of  poets  who  preceded 
the  Louis  XIV.  writers — to  Ronsard  and  "The  Pleiade." 


The  ^mantic  {Movement  in  France.  191 

Later  the  Old  French  Text  Society  was  founded  for  the 
preservation  and  publication  of  mediaeval  remains.  But 
in  general  the  innovating  school  sought  their  inspiration 
in  foreign  literatures.  Antony  Deschamps  translated 
the  "  Inferno  " ;  Alfred  de  Vigny  translated  "  Othello  "  as 
the  "Moor  of  Venice"  (1829),  and  wrote  a  play  on  the 
story  of  Chatterton,*  and  a  novel,  "  Cinq  Mars,"  which  is 
the  nearest  thing  in  French  literature  to  the  historical 
romances  of  Scottf  Chateaubriand  and  Victor  Hugo 
were  both  powerfully  impressed  by  Macpherson's  "Os- 
sian."  Gerard  de  Nerval  made,  at  the  age  of  eighteen, 
a  translation  of  "  Faust "  (1828),  which  Goethe  read  with 
admiration,  and  wrote  to  the  translator,  saying  that  he 
had  never  before  understood  his  own  meaning  so  well. 
"  It  was  a  difficult  task  at  that  time,"  says  Gautier,  "  to 
render  into  our  tongue,  which  had  become  excessively 
timid,  the  bizarre  and  mysterious  beauties  of  this  ultra- 
romantic  drama.  .  .  .  From  his  familiarity  with  Goethe, 
Uhland,  Burger  and  L.  Tieck,  Gerard  retained  in  his 
turn  of  mind  a  certain  dreamy  tinge  which  sometimes 
made  his  own  works  seem  like  translations  of  unknown 
poets  beyond  the  Rhine.  .  .  .  The  sympathies  and  the 
studies  of  Gerard  de  Nerval  drew  him  naturally  towards 
Germany,  which  he  often  visited  and  where  he  made  fruit- 
ful sojourns;  the  shadow  of  the  old  Teutonic  oak  hovered 
more  than  once  above  his  brow  with  confidential  mur- 
murs; he  walked  under  the  lindens  with  their  heart- 
shaped  leaves;  on  the  margin  of  fountains  he  saluted 
the  elf  whose  white  robe  trails  a  hem  bedewed  by  the 
green  grass;  he  saw  the  ravens  circling  around  the  moun- 

*See  vol.  i.t  pp.  372-73. 
f  Gautier,  163. 


192  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

tain  of  Kyffhausen;  the  kobolds  came  out  before  him 
from  the  rock  clefts  of  the  Hartz,  and  the  witches  of  the 
Brocken  danced  their  grand  Walpurgisnight  round  about 
the  young  French  poet,  whom  they  took  for  a  Jena  stu- 
dent. .  .  .  He  knows  how  to  blow  upon  the  postillion's 
horn,*  the  enchanted  melodies  of  Achim  von  Arnim  and 
Clement  Brentano;  and  if  he  stops  at  the  threshold  of 
an  inn  embowered  in  hop  vines,  the  Schoppen  becomes 
in  his  hands  the  cup  of  the  King  of  Thule."  Among 
the  French  romanticists  of  Hugo's  circle  there  was  a 
great  enthusiasm  for  wild  German  ballads  like  Burger's 
"Lenore"  and  Goethe's  "Erl-King."  The  translation 
of  A.  W.  Schlegel's  "Vorlesungen  iiber  Dramatische 
Kunst  und  Litteratur,"  by  Madame  Necker  de  Saussure, 
in  18 1 4,  was  doubtless  the  first  fruits  of  Madame  de 
Stael's  "  Allemagne,"  published  the  year  before.  Gau- 
tier  himself  and  his  friend  Augustus  Mac-Keat  (Auguste 
Maguet)  collaborated  in  a  drama  founded  on  Byron's 
"  Parisina."  "  Walter  Scott  was  then  in  the  full  flower 
of  his  success.  People  were  being  initiated  into  the 
mysteries  of  Goethe's  *  Faust,'  .  .  .  and  discovering 
Shakspere  under  the  translation,  a  little  dressed  up,  of 
Letourneur;  and  the  poems  of  Lord  Byron,  *  The  Corsair,' 
'  Lara,'  *  The  Giaour,'  *  Manfred,'  *  Beppo,'  *  Don  Juan,' 
were  coming  to  us  from  the  Orient,  which  had  not  yet 
grown  commonplace."  Gautier  said  that  in  le  petit  dna- 
de — the  inner  circle  of  the  initiated — if  you  admired 
Racine  more  than  Shakspere  and  Calderon,  it  was  an 
opinion  that  you  would  do  well  to  keep  to  yourself. 
"Toleration  is  not  the  virtue  of  neophytes."  As  for 
himself,  who  had  set  out  as  a  painter — and  only  later  de- 
*"Des  Knaben  Wunderhorn." 


The  eI(pmantic  (Movement  in  France.  193 

viated  into  letters — he  was  all  for  the  Middle  Ages :  "  An 
old  iron  baron,  feudal,  ready  to  take  refuge  from  the  en- 
croachments of  the  time,  in  the  castle  of  Goetz  von  Ber- 
lichingen."  Of  Bouchardy,  the  extraordinary  author  of 
"Le  Sonneur  de  Saint  Paul,"  who  "was  to  Hugo  what 
Marlowe  was  to  Shakspere" — and  who  was  playfully 
accused  of  making  wooden  models  of  the  plots  of  his 
melodramas — Gautier  says  that  he  "  planned  his  singular 
edifice  in  advance,  like  a  castle  of  Anne  Radcliffe,  with 
donjon,  turrets,  underground  chambers,  secret  passages, 
corkscrew  stairs,  vaulted  halls,  mysterious  closets,  hiding 
places  in  the  thickness  of  the  walls,  oubliettes,  charnel- 
houses,  crypts  where  his  heroes  and  heroines  were  to 
meet  later  on,  to  love,  hate,  fight,  set  ambushes,  assas- 
sinate, or  marry.  .  .  .  He  cut  masked  doors  in  the  walls 
for  his  expected  personage  to  appear  through,  and  trap 
doors  in  the  floor  for  him  to  disappear  through." 

The  reasons  for  this  resort  to  foreign  rather  than  native 
sources  of  inspiration  are  not  far  to  seek.  The  romantic 
movement  in  France  was  belated;  it  was  twenty  or  thirty 
years  behind  the  similar  movements  in  England  and 
Germany.  It  was  easier  and  more  natural  for  Stendhal 
or  Hugo  to  appeal  to  the  example  of  living  masters  like 
Goethe  and  Scott,  whose  works  went  everywhere  in  trans- 
lation and  who  held  the  ear  of  Europe,  than  to  revive  an 
interest  all  at  once  in  Villon  or  Guillaume  de  Lorris  or 
Chrestien  de  Troyes.  Again,  in  no  country  had  the  di- 
vorce between  fashionable  and  popular  literature  been  so 
complete  as  in  France;  in  none  had  so  thick  and  hard  a 
crust  of  classicism  overlain  the  indigenous  product  of 
the  national  genius.  It  was  not  altogether  easy  for 
Bishop  Percy  in  1765  to  win  immediate  recognition  from 


194  ^  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

the  educated  class  for  Old  English  minstrelsy;  nor  for 
Herder  and  Burger  in  1770  to  do  the  same  thing  for  the 
German  ballads.  In  France  it  would  have  been  impossi- 
ble before  the  Bourbon  restoration  of  1815.  In  England 
and  in  Germany,  moreover,  the  higher  literature  had  al- 
ways remained  more  closely  in  touch  with  the  people. 
In  both  of  those  countries  the  stock  of  ballad  poetry  and 
folklore  was  much  more  extensive  and  important  than  in 
France,  and  the  habit  of  composing  ballads  lasted  later. 
The  only  French  writers  of  the  classical  period  who  pro- 
duced anything  at  all  analogous  to  the  German  "Mahr- 
chen "  were  Charles  Perrault,  who  published  between 
1691-97  his  famous  fairy  tales,  including  "Blue  Beard," 
"The  Sleeping  Beauty,"  "Little  Red  Riding-Hood," 
"  Cinderella,"  and  "  Puss  in  Boots  " ;  and  the  Countess 
d'Aulnoy  (died  1720),  whose  "Yellow  Dwarf"  and 
"  White  Cat "  belong  to  the  same  department  of  nursery 
tales.* 

A  curious  feature  of  French  romanticism  was  the  way 
in  which  the  new-found  liberty  of  art  asserted  itself  in 
manners,  costume,  and  personal  habits.  Victor  Hugo 
himself  was  scrupulously  correct  and  subdued  in  dress, 
but  his  young  disciples  affected  bright  colours  and  rich 
stuffs.  They  wore  Spanish  mantillas,  coats  with  large 
velvet  lapels,  pointed  doublets  or  jerkins  of  satin  or 
damask  velvet  in  place  of  the  usual  waistcoat;  long  hair 
after  the  Merovingian  fashion,  and  pointed  beards.  We 
have  seen  that  Shenstone  was  regarded  as  an  eccentric, 
and  perhaps  somewhat  dangerous,  person  when  at  the 
university,  because  he  wore  his  own  hair  instead  of  a 
wig.     In  France,  half  a  century  later,  not  only  thzper- 

*  Charles  Nodier  vindicated  the  literary  claims  of  Perrault 


The  'Romantic  [Movement  in  France.  195 

ruque,  but  the  menton  glabre  was  regarded  as  sympto- 
matic of  the  classicist  and  the  academician ;  while  the 
beard  became  a  badge  of  romanticism.  At  the  beginning 
of  the  movement,  Gautier  informs  us,  "there  were  only 
two  full  beards  in  France,  the  beard  of  Eugene  Deveria 
and  the  beard  of  Petrus  Borel.  To  wear  them  required 
a  courage,  a  coolness,  and  a  contempt  for  the  crowd  truly 
heroic.  ...  It  was  the  fashion  then  i&  the  romantic 
school  to  be  pale,  livid,  greenish,  a  trifle  cadaverous,  if 
possible.  It  gave  one  an  air  of  doom,  Byronic,  giaouris/i, 
devoured  by  passion  and  remorse."  It  will  be  remem- 
bered that  the  rolling  Byronic  collar,  open  at  the  throat, 
was  much  affected  at  one  time  by  young  persons  of  ro- 
mantic temperament  in  England;  and  that  the  conserva- 
tive classes,  who  adhered  to  the  old-fashioned  stock  and 
high  collar,  looked  askance  upon  these  youthful  innova- 
tors as  certainly  atheists  and  libertines,  and  probably 
enemies  to  society — would-be  corsairs  or  banditti.  It  is 
interesting,  therefore,  to  discover  that  in  France,  too,  the 
final  touch  of  elegance  among  the  romantics  was  not  to 
have  any  white  linen  in  evidence;  the  shirt  collar,  in 
particular,  being  "  considered  as  a  mark  of  the  grocer, 
the  bourgeois,  the  philistine."  A  certain  gilet  rouge 
which  Gautier  wore  when  he  led  the  claque  at  the  first 
performance  of  "  Hernani "  has  become  historic.  This 
flamboyant  garment — a  defiance  and  a  challenge  to  the 
academicians  who  had  come  to  hiss  Hugo's  play — was, 
in  fact,  2l  pourpoint  ox  jerkin  of  cherry-coloured  satin,  cut 
in  the  shape  of  a  Milanese  cuirass,  pointed,  busked,  and 
arched  in  front,  and  fastened  behind  the  back  with  hooks 
and  eyes.  From  the  imperturbable  disdain  with  which 
the  wearer  faced  the  opera-glasses  and  laughter  of  the 


196  tA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

assembly  it  was  evident  that  it  would  not  have  taken 
much  urging  to  induce  him  to  come  to  the  second  night's 
performance  decked  in  a  daffodil  waistcoat.*  The  young 
enthusiasts  of  le  petit  chiacle  carried  their  Byronism  so  far 
that,  in  imitation  of  the  celebrated  revels  at  Newstead, 
they  used  to  drink  from  a  human  skull  in  their  feasts  at 
le  Petit  Moulin  Rouge.  It  had  belonged  to  a  drum-major, 
and  Ge'rard  de  Nerval  got  it  from  his  father,  who  had 
been  an  army  surgeon.  One  of  the  neophytes,  in  his  ex- 
citement, even  demanded  that  it  be  filled  with  sea  water 
instead  of  wine,  in  emulation  of  the  hero  of  Victor  Hugo's 
novel,  "  Han  d'Islande,"  who  "  drank  the  water  of  the 
seas  in  the  skull  of  the  dead."  Another  caput  mortuum 
stood  on  Hugo's  mantelpiece  in  place  of  a  clock. \  "  If  it 
did  not  tell  the  hour,  at  least  it  made  us  think  of  the  ir- 
reparable flight  of  time.  It  was  the  verse  of  Horace  trans- 
lated into  romantic  symbolism."  There  was  a  decided 
flavour  of  Bohemianism  about  the  French  romantic  school, 
and  the  spirit  of  the  lives  which  many  of  them  led  may 
best  be  studied  in  Murger's  classic, "  La  Vie  de  Boheme."  \ 
As  another  special  feature  of  French  romanticism,  we 
may  note  the  important  part  taken  by  the  theatre  in  the 
history  of  the  movement.  The  stage  was  the  citadel  of 
classical  prejudice,  and  it  was  about  it  that  the  fiercest 
battles  were  fought.  The  climacteric  year  was  1830,  in 
which  year  Victor  Hugo's  tragedy,  "  Hernani,  or  Castil- 
ian  Honour,"  was  put  on  at  the  The'atre  Frangais  on  Feb- 
ruary 25th,  and  ran  for  thirty  nights.  The  representation 
was  a  fight  between  the  classics  and  the  romantics,  and 

*Gautier,  92. 

f  Rue  Jean-Gougon,  where  the  cenacle  met  often. 
%  Nerval  hanged  himself  at  Paris,  in  January,  1855,  in  the 
rue  de  la  Vielle  Lanterne. 


The  cRpmantic  {Movement  in  France.  197 

there  was  almost  a  mob  in  the  theatre.  The  dramatic 
censorship  under  Charles  X.,  though  strict,  was  used  in 
the  interest  of  political  rather  than  aesthetic  orthodoxy. 
But  it  is  said  that  some  of  the  older  Academicians  actu- 
ally applied  to  the  king  to  forbid  the  acting  of  "  Her- 
nani."  Gautier  has  given  a  mock-heroic  description  of 
this  famous  literary  battle  quorum  pars  magna  juit.  He 
had  received  from  his  college  friend,  Gerard  de  Nerval 
— who  had  been  charged  with  the  duty  of  drumming  up 
recruits  for  the  Hugonic  claque — six  tickets  to  be  dis- 
tributed only  to  tried  friends  of  the  cause — sure  men  and 
true.  The  tickets  themselves  were  little  squares  of  red 
paper,  stamped  in  the  corner  with  a  mysterious  counter- 
sign— the  Spanish  word  hierro,  iron,  not  only  symbolizing 
the  hero  of  the  drama,  but  hinting  that  the  ticket-holder 
was  to  bear  himself  in  the  approaching  fray  frankly, 
bravely,  and  faithfully  like  the  sword.  The  proud  recip- 
ient of  these  tokens  of  confidence  gave  two  of  them  to  a 
couple  of  artists — ferocious  romantics,  who  would  gladly 
have  eaten  an  Academician,  if  necessary;  two  he  gave  to 
a  brace  of  young  poets  who  secretly  practised  la  rime 
riche^le  mot  propre,  and  la  metaphor e  exacte :  the  other  two 
he  reserved  for  his  cousin  and  himself.  The  general  at- 
titude of  the  audience  on  the  first  nights  was  hostile, 
"  two  systems,  two  parties,  two  armies,  two  civilizations 
even — it  is  not  saying  too  much — confronted  one  an- 
other, .  .  .  and  it  was  not  hard  to  see  that  yonder  young 
man  with  long  hair  found  the  smoothly  shaved  gentle- 
man opposite  a  disastrous  idiot;  and  that  he  would  not 
long  be  at  pains  to  conceal  his  opinion  of  him."  The 
classical  part  of  the  audience  resented  the  touches  of 
Spanish  local  colour  in  the  play,  the  mixture  of  pleas- 


198  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

antries  and  familiar  speeches  with  the  tragic  dialogue, 
and  of  heroism  and  savagery  in  the  character  of  Hernani ; 
and  they  made  all  manner  of  fun  of  the  species  of  pun 
— de  ta  suite^j'en  snis — which  terminated  the  first  act. 
"  Certain  lines  were  captured  and  recaptured,  like  dis- 
puted redoubts,  by  each  army  with  equal  obstinacy.  On 
one  day  the  romantics  would  carry  a  passage,  which  the 
enemy  would  retake  the  next  day,  and  from  which  it  be- 
came necessary  to  dislodge  them.  What  uproar,  what 
cries,  cat-calls,  hisses,  hurricanes  of  bravos,  thunders  of 
applause !  The  heads  of  parties  blackguarded  each  other 
like  Homer's  heroes  before  they  came  to  blows.  .  .  .  For 
this  generation  *  Hernani '  was  what  the  *  Cid  '  was  for  the 
contemporaries  of  Corneille.  All  that  was  young,  brave, 
amorous,  poetic,  caught  the  inspiration  of  it.  Those  fine 
exaggerations,  heroic,  Castilian;  that  superb  Spanish 
emphasis;  that  language  so  proud  and  high  even  in  its 
familiarity;  those  images  of  a  dazzling  strangeness,  threw 
us  into  an  ecstasy  and  intoxicated  us  with  their  heady 
poetry. "  The  victory  in  the  end  was  with  the  new  school. 
Musset,  writing  in  1838,  says  that  the  tragedies  of  Cor- 
neille and  Racine  had  disappeared  from  the  French  stage 
for  ten  years. 

Another  triumphant  battlefield — a  veritable  jete  ro- 
mantique — was  the  first  representation  in  183 1  of  Alex- 
andre Dumas'  "Anthony."  "It  was  an  agitation,  a 
tumult,  an  effervescence.  .  .  .  The  house  was  actually 
delirious;  it  applauded,  sobbed,  wept,  shouted.  A  cer- 
tain famous  green  coat  was  torn  from  the  author's  back 
and  rent  into  shreds  by  his  too  ardent  admirers,  who 
wanted  pieces  of  it  for  memorabilia."  * 
*Gautier,  167. 


The  Romantic  (Movement  in  France.  199 

The  English  reader  who  hears  of  the  stubborn  resist- 
ance offered  to  the  performance  of  *  Hernani '  will  natu- 
rally suppose  that  there  must  have  been  something  about 
it  contrary  to  public  policy — some  immorality,  or  some 
political  references,  at  least,  offensive  to  the  government; 
and  he  will  have  a  difficulty  in  understanding  that  the 
trouble  was  all  about  affairs  purely  literary.  "  Hernani  " 
was  fought  because  it  violated  the  unities  of  place  and 
time;  because  its  hero  was  a  Spanish  bandit;  because  in 
the  dialogue  a  spade  was  called  a  spade,  and  in  the  verse 
the  lines  overlap.  The  French  are  often  charged  with 
frivolity  in  matters  of  conduct,  but  to  the  discussion  of 
matters  of  art  they  bring  a  most  serious  conscience.  The 
scene  in  "Hernani"  shifts  from  Saragossa  to  the  castle 
of  Don  Ruy  Gomez  de  Silva  in  the  mountains  of  Arra- 
gon,  and  to  the  tomb  of  Charlemagne  at  Aix-la-Chapelle. 
The  time  of  the  action,  though  not  precisely  indicated, 
covers  at  least  a  number  of  months.  The  dialogue  is,  in 
many  parts,  nervous,  simple,  direct,  abrupt;  in  others 
running  into  long  tirades  and  soliloquies,  rich  with  all  the 
poetic  resources  of  the  greatest  poet  who  has  ever  used  the 
French  tongue.  The  spirit  of  the  drama,  as  well  as  its 
form,  is  romantic.  The  point  of  honour  is  pushed  to  a 
fantastic  excess;  all  the  characters  display  the  most  deli- 
cate chivalry,  the  noblest  magnanimity,  the  loftiest  Castil- 
ian  pride.  Don  Ruy  Gomez  allows  the  King  to  carry  off 
his  bride,  rather  than  yield  up  the  outlaw  who  has  taken 
refuge  in  his  castle;  and  that  although  he  has  just 
caught  this  same  outlaw  paying  court  to  this  same 
bride,  whose  accepted  lover  he  is.  Hernani,  not  to  be 
outdone  in  generosity,  offers  his  life  to  his  enemy  and 
preserver,  giving  him  his  horn  and  promising  to  come  to 


200  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

meet  his  death  at  its  summons.  There  is  the  same  fault 
here  which  is  felt  in  Hugo's  novels.  Motives  are  exag- 
gerated, the  dramatis  personce  strut.  They  are  rather 
over-dramatic  in  their  poses — melodramatic,  in  fact — 
and  do  unlikely  things.  But  this  fault  is  the  fault  of  a 
great  nature,  grandeur  exalted  into  grandiosity,  till  the 
heroes  of  these  plays,  "  Hernani,"  "Marion  Delorme," 
"Le  Roi  d' Amuse,"  loom  and  stalk  across  the  scene  like 
epic  demigods  of  more  than  mortal  stature  and  mortal 
passions.  But  Hugo  was  not  only  a  great  dramatist  and 
a  great  poet,  but  a  most  clever  playwright.  "  Hernani  " 
is  full  of  effective  stage  devices,  crises  in  the  action 
which  make  an  audience  hold  its  breath  or  shudder; 
moments  of  intense  suspense  like  that  in  the  third  act, 
where  the  old  hidalgo  pauses  before  his  own  portrait, 
behind  which  the  outlaw  is  hidden ;  or  that  in  the  fifth, 
where  Hernani  hears  at  first,  faint  and  far  away,  the  blast 
of  the  fatal  horn  that  summons  him  to  leave  his  bride  at 
the  altar  and  go  to  his  death.  The  young  romantics  of 
the  day  all  got  "  Hernani "  by  heart  and  used  to  rehearse 
it  at  their  assemblies,  each  taking  a  part;  and  the  famous 
trumpet,  the  cor  d  'Hernani,  became  a  symbol  and  a  rally- 
ing call. 

No  such  scene  would  have  been  possible  in  an  Eng- 
lish playhouse  as  that  which  attended  the  first  represen- 
tation of  "  Hernani  "  at  the  Theatre  Francois.  For  not 
only  is  an  English  audience  comparatively  indifferent  to 
rules  of  art  and  canons  of  taste,  but  the  unities  had  never 
prevailed  in  practice  in  England,  though  constantly  rec- 
ommended in  theory.  The  French  had  no  Shakspere, 
and  the  English  no  Academy.  We  may  construct  an 
imaginary  parallel  to  such  a  scene  if  we  will  suppose 


The  ^mantle  {Movement  in  France.  201 

that  all  reputable  English  tragedies  from  1600  down  to 
1830  had  been  something  upon  the  model  of  Addison's 
"Cato"  and  Johnson's  "Irene";  or  better  still  upon  the 
model  of  Dryden's  heroic  plays  in  rimed  couplets;  and 
that  then  a  drama  like  "  Romeo  and  Juliet "  had  been 
produced  upon  the  boards  of  Drury  Lane,  and  a  warm 
spurt  of  romantic  poetry  suddenly  injected  into  the  icy 
current  of  classic  declamation. 

Having  considered  the  chief  points  in  which  the 
French  romantic  movement  differed  from  the  similar 
movements  in  England  and  Germany,  let  us  now  glance 
at  the  history  of  its  beginnings,  and  at  the  work  of  a 
few  of  its  typical  figures.  The  presentation  of  "Her- 
nani "  in  1830  was  by  no  means  the  first  overt  act  of 
the  new  school.  Discussion  had  been  going  on  for 
years  in  the  press.  De  Stendhal  says  that  the  classi- 
cists had  on  their  side  two-thirds  of  the  Academie  Fran- 
chise, and  all  of  the  French  journalists;  that  their  lead- 
ing organ,  however,  was  the  very  influential  Journal  des 
Debats  and  its  editor,  M.  Dussant,  the  general-in-chief 
of  the  classical  party.  The  romanticists,  however,  were 
not  without  organs  of  their  own ;  among  which  are  espe- 
cially mentioned  Le  Co?iseruateur  Litrtraire,  begun  in 
1 8 19,  Le  Globe  in  1824,  and  the  Annates  Romantiques 
in  1823,  the  last  being  "practically  a  kind  of  annual  of 
the  Muse  Francaise  (1823-24),  which  had  pretty  nearly 
the  same  contributors."  All  of  these  journals  were 
Bourboniste,  except  Le  Globe,  which  was  liberal  in  poli- 
tics.*    The  Academy  denounced  the  new  literary  doc- 

*  The  romanticism  of  the  Globe  was  of  a  more  conservative 
stripe  than  that  of  the  Muse  Francaise,  which  was  the  organ 
of  the  group  of  young  poets  who  surrounded  Hugo.  The 
motto  of  the  latter  was  Jam  nova  progenies  coelo  demittitur 


>, 


202  <>A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

trine  as  a  heresy  and  its  followers  as  a  sect,  but  it  made 

head  so  rapidly  that  as  early  as   1829,  a  year  before 

"  Hernani "  was  acted,  a  "  Histoire  du  Romantisme  en 

France  "  appeared,  written  by  a  certain  M.  de  Toreinx.* 

It  agrees  with  other  authorities  in  dating  the  beginning 

of  the  movement  from  Chateaubriand's  "Le  Genie  du 

Christianisme  "  (1802).    "  Chateaubriand,"  says Gautier, 

"  may  be  regarded  as  the  grandfather,  or,  if  you  prefer  it, 

the  sachem  of  romanticism  in  France.     In  the  *  Genius 

of  Christianity '  he  restored  the  Gothic  cathedral ;  in  the 

*  Natchez '  he  reopened  the  sublimity  of  nature,  which 

I  had  been  closed ;  in  '  Rene  '  he  invented  melancholy  and 

modern  passion." 

*     Sprung  from  an  ancient  Breton  family,  Chateaubriand 

came  to  America  in  1790  with  the  somewhat  singular  and 

very  French  idea  of  travelling  overland  to  the  northwest 

passage.     He  was  diverted  from  this  enterprise,  however, 

alto.  The  Globe  defined  romanticism  as  Protestantism  in  let- 
ters. The  critical  battle  was  on  as  early  as  1824.  On  April 
24,  in  that  year,  Auger,  director  of  the  Academy,  read  at  the 
annual  session  of  the  Institute  a  discourse  on  romanticism, 
which  he  denounced  as  a  literary  schism.  The  prospectus  of 
the  Globe,  an  important  document  on  the  romantic  side,  dates 
from  the  same  year.  The  Constitutionnel,  the  most  narrowly 
classical  of  the  opposing  journals,  described  romanticism  as  an 
epidemic  malady.  To  the  year  1825,  when  the  Cenacle  had 
its  headquarters  at  Victor  Hugo's  house,  belong-,  among  oth- 
ers, the  following  manifestoes  on  both  sides  of  the  controversy  : 
"Les  Classiques  Venges,"  De  la  Touche ;  "Le  Temple  du 
Romantisme,"  Morel;  "Le  Classique  et  le  Romantique"  (a 
satirical  comedy  in  the  classical  interest),  Baour-Lormian. 
Cyprien  Desmarais'  "Essais  sur  les  classiques  et  les  roman- 
tiques  "  had  appeared  at  Paris  in  1823.  At  Rouen  was  printed 
in  1826  "Du  Classique  et  du  Romantique,"  a  collection  of  pa- 
pers read  at  the  Rouen  Academy  during  the  year,  rather 
favorable,  on  the  whole,  to  the  new  movement. 

*  This  is  now  a  somewhat  rare  book ;  I  have  never  seen  a 
copy  of  it ;  but  it  was  reviewed  in  The  Saturday  Review  (vol. 
lxv.,p.  369). 


Tbe  %gmantic  [Movement  in  France.  203 

fell  in  with  an  Indian  tribe  and  wandered  about  with 
them  in  the  wilderness.  He  did  not  discover  the  north- 
west passage,  but,  according  to  Lowell,  he  invented  the 
forest  primeval.  Chateaubriand  gave  the  first  full  utter- 
ance to  that  romantic  note  which  sounds  so  loudly  in 
Byron's  verse;  the  restless  dissatisfaction  with  life  as 
it  is,  the  longing  for  something  undefined  and  unattain- 
able, the  love  for  solitude  and  the  desert,  the  "  passion 
incapable  of  being  converted  into  action  " — in  short,  the 
\tnaladie  du  Steele — since  become  familiar  in  "  Childe  Har- 
old "  and  in  Senancour's  "Obermann."  In  one  of  the 
chapters*  of  "Le  Ge'nie  du  Christianisme"  he  gives  an 
analysis  of  this  modern  melancholy,  this  Byronic  satiety 
and  discontent,  which  he  says  was  unknown  to  the  an- 
cients. "  The  farther  nations  advance  in  civilization,  the 
more  this  unsettled  state  of  the  passions  predominates; 
for  then  our  imagination  is  rich,  abundant,  and  full  of 
wonders;  but  our  existence  is  poor,  insipid,  and  destitute 
of  charms.  With  a  full  heart  we  dwell  in  an  empty 
world."  "  Penetrate  into  those  forests  of  America  coeval 
with  the  world;  what  profound  silence  pervades  these 
retreats  when  the  winds  are  husht !  What  unknown  voices 
when  they  begin  to  rise!  Stand  still  and  everything  is 
mute;  take  but  a  step  and  all  nature  sighs.  Night  ap- 
proaches, the  shades  thicken ;  you  hear  herds  of  wild 
beasts  passing  in  the  dark;  the  ground  murmurs  under 
your  feet;  the  pealing  thunder  rebellows  in  the  deserts; 
the  forest  bows,  the  trees  fall,  an  unknown  river  rolls 
before  you.  The  moon  at  length  bursts  forth  in  the  east; 
as  you  proceed  at  the  foot  of  the  trees,  she  seems  to  move 
before  you  on  their  tops  and  solemnly  to  accompany  your 
*  Part  ii.,  Book  Hi.,  chap  ix. 


204  v4  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

steps.  The  wanderer  seats  himself  on  the  trunk  of  an  oak 
to  await  the  return  of  day;  he  looks  alternately  at  the 
nocturnal  luminary,  the  darkness,  and  the  river;  he  feels 
restless,  agitated,  and  in  expectation  of  something  ex- 
traordinary; a  pleasure  never  felt  before,  an  unusual  fear, 
cause  his  heart  to  throb,  as  if  he  were  about  to  be  ad- 
mitted to  some  secret  of  the  Divinity ;  he  is  alone  in  the 
depth  of  the  forests,  but  the  mind  of  man  is  equal  to  the 
expanse  of  nature,  and  all  the  solitudes  of  the  earth  are 
not  too  vast  for  the  contemplations  of  his  heart.  There 
is  in  man  an  instinctive  melancholy,  which  makes  him 
harmonise  with  the  scenery  of  nature.  Who  has  not 
spent  whole  hours  seated  on  the  bank  of  a  river,  contem- 
plating its  passing  waves?  Who  has  not  found  pleasure 
on  the  seashore  in  viewing  the  distant  rock  whitened  by 
the  billows?  How  much  are  the  ancients  to  be  pitied, 
who  discovered  in  the  ocean  naught  but  the  palace  of 
Neptune  and  the  cavern  of  Proteus ;  it  was  hard  that  they 
should  perceive  only  the  adventures  of  the  Tritons  and 
the  Nereids  in  the  immensity  of  the  seas,  which  seems  to 
give  an  indistinct  measure  of  the  greatness  of  our  souls, 
and  which  excites  a  vague  desire  to  quit  this  life,  that 
we  may  embrace  all  nature  and  taste  the  fulness  jot  joy 
in  the  presence  of  its  Author."  * 

The  outbreak  of  the  Revolution  recalled  Chateaubriand 
to  France.  He  joined  the  army  of  the  emigrkes  at  Cob- 
lentz,  was  wounded  at  the  siege  of  Thionville,  and  es- 
caped into  England  where  he  lived  (1793-1800)  until  the 
time  of  the  Consulate,  when  he  made  his  peace  with 
Napoleon  and  returned  to  France.  He  had  been  a  free- 
thinker, but  was  converted  to  Christianity  by  a  dying 
*  Part  ii. ,  Book  iv. ,  chap.  i. 


7 be  'Romantic  {Movement  in  France,  205 

message  from  his  mother  who  was  thrown  into  prison  by 
the  revolutionists.  "I  wept,"  said  Chateaubriand,  "and 
I  believed."  "Le  Genie  du  Christianisme  "  was  an  ex- 
pression of  that  reactionary  feeling  which  drove  numbers 
of  Frenchmen  back  into  the  Church,  after  the  blas- 
phemies and  horrors  of  the  Revolution.  It  came  out 
just  when  Napoleon  was  negotiating  his  Concordat  with 
the  Pope,  and  was  trying  to  enlist  the  religious  and  con- 
servative classes  in  support  of  his  government;  and  it 
reinforced  his  purposes  so  powerfully  that  he  appointed 
the  author,  in  spite  of  his  legitimism,  to  several  diplo- 
matic posts.  "  Le  Ge'nie  du  Christianisme  "  is  indeed  a 
plea  for  Christianity  on  aesthetic  grounds — an  attempt, 
as  has  been  sneeringly  said,  to  recommend  Christianity 
by  making  it  look  pretty.  Chateaubriand  was  not  a  close 
reasoner;  his  knowledge  was  superficial  and  inaccurate; 
his  character  was  weakened  by  vanity  and  shallowness. 
He  was  a  sentimentalist  and  a  rhetorician,  but  one  of 
the  most  brilliant  of  rhetoricians ;  while  his  sentiment, 
though  not  always  deep  or  lasting,  was  for  the  nonce 
sufficiently  sincere.  He  had  in  particular  a  remarkable 
talent  forpictorial  description ;  and  his  book,  translated 
into  many  tongues,  enjoyed  an  extraordinary  vogue.  The 
English  version,  made  in  18 15,  was  entitled  "The  Beau- 
ties of  Christianity."  For  Chateaubriand  undertook  to 
show  that  the  Christian  religion  had  influenced  favorably 
literature  and  the  fine  arts;  that  it  was  more  poetical 
than  any  other  system  of  belief  and  worship.  He  com- 
pared Homer  and  Vergil  with  Dante,  Tasso,  Milton,  and 
other  modern  poets,  and  awarded  the  palm  to  the  latter 
in  the  treatment  of  the  elementary  relations  and  stock 
characters,  such  as  husband  and  wife,  father  and  child, 


206  zA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

the  priest,  the  soldier,  the  lover,  etc. ;  preferring  Pope's 
Eloisa,  e.g.,  to  Vergil's  Dido,  and  "  Paul  and  Virginia  " 
to  the  idyls  of  Theocritus.  He  pronounced  the  Chris- 
tian mythology — angels,  devils,  saints,  miracles — su- 
perior to  the  pagan;  and  Dante's  Hell  much  more 
impressive  to  the  imagination  than  Tartarus.  He  dwelt 
eloquently  upon  the  beauty  and  affecting  significance  of 
Gothic  church  architecture,  of  Catholic  ritual  and  sym- 
bolism, the  dress  of  the  clergy,  the  crucifix,  the  organ,  the 
church  bell,  the  observances  of  Christian  festivals,  the 
monastic  life,  the  orders  of  chivalry,  the  country  church- 
yards where  the  dead  were  buried,  and  even  upon  the 
superstitions  which  the  last  century  had  laughed  to  scorn; 
such  as  the  belief  in  ghosts,  the  adoration  of  relics,  vows 
to  saints  and  pilgrimages  to  holy  places.  In  his  chap- 
ter on  "The  Influence  of  Christianity  upon  Music,"  he 
says  that  the  "Christian  religion  is  essentially  melodious 
for  this  single  reason,  that  she  delights  in  solitude  " ;  the 
forests  are  her  ancient  abode,  and  her  musician  "  ought 
to  be  acquainted  with  the  melancholy  notes  of  the  waters 
and  the  trees;  he  ought  to  have  studied  the  sound  of  the 
winds  in  cloisters,  and  those  murmurs  that  pervade  the 
Gothic  temple,  the  grass  of  the  cemetery,  and  the  vaults 
of  death."  He  repeats  the  ancient  fable  that  the  design- 
ers of  the  cathedrals  were  applying  forest  scenery  to 
architecture:  "Those  ceilings  sculptured  into  foliage  of 
different  kinds,  those  buttresses  which  prop  the  walls  and 
terminate  abruptly  like  the  broken  trunks  of  trees,  the 
coolness  of  the  vaults,  the  darkness  of  the  sanctuary,  the 
dim  twilight  of  the  aisles,  the  chapels  resembling  grottoes, 
the  secret  passages,  the  low  doorways,  in  a  word  every- 
thing in  a  Gothic  church  reminds  you  of  the  labyrinths 


Tbe  Romantic  [Movement  in  France.  207 

of  a  wood,  everything  excites  a  feeling  of  religious  awe, 
of  mystery,  and  of  the  Divinity."  The  birds  perch  upon 
the  steeples  and  towers  as  if  they  were  trees,  and  "  the 
Christian  architect,  not  content  with  building  forests,  has 
been  desirous  to  retain  their  murmurs,  and  by  means  of 
the  organ  and  of  bells,  he  has  attached  to  the  Gothic 
temple  the  very  winds  and  the  thunders  that  roll  in  the 
recesses  of  the  woods.  Past  ages,  conjured  up  by  these 
religious  sounds,  raise  their  venerable  voices  from  the 
bosom  of  the  stones  and  sigh  in  every  corner  of  the  vast 
cathedral.  The  sanctuary  re-echoes  like  the  cavern  of 
the  ancient  Sibyl ;  loud-tongued  bells  swing  over  your 
head ;  while  the  vaults  of  death  under  your  feet  are  pro- 
foundly silent."  He  praises  the  ideals  of  chivalry; 
gives  a  sympathetic  picture  of  the  training  and  career  of 
a  knight-errant,  and  asks:  "Is  there  then  nothing  worthy 
of  admiration  in  the  times  of  a  Roland,  a  Godfrey,  a 
Coucey,  and  a  Joinville;  in  the  times  of  the  Moors  and 
the  Saracens;  .  .  .  when  the  strains  of  the  Troubadours 
were  mingled  with  the  clash  of  arms,  dances  with  relig- 
ious ceremonies,  and  banquets  and  tournaments  with 
sieges  and  battles  ?  "  Chateaubriand  says  that  the  finest 
Gothic  ruins  are  to  be  found  in  the  English  lake  country, 
on  the  Scotch  mountains,  and  in  the  Orkney  Islands; 
and  that  they  are  more  impressive  than  classic  ruins 
because  in  the  latter  the  arches  are  parallel  with  the 
curves  of  the  sky,  while  in  the  Gothic  or  pointed  archi- 
tecture the  arches  "form  a  contrast  with  the  circular 
arches  of  the  sky  and  the  curvatures  of  the  horizon. 
The  Gothic  being,  moreover,  entirely  composed  of  voids, 
the  more  readily  admits  of  the  decoration  of  herbage  and 
flowers  than  the  fulness  of  the  Grecian  orders.     The 


208  cA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

clustered  columns,  the  domes  carved  into  foliage,  or 
scooped  out  in  the  form  of  a  fruit-basket,  offered  so  many 
receptacles  into  which  the  winds  carry,  with  the  dust,  the 
seeds  of  vegetables.  The  house-leek  fixes  itself  in  the 
mortar;  the  mosses  cover  rugged  masses  with  their  elas- 
tic coating;  the  thistle  projects  its  brown  burrs  from  the 
embrasure  of  a  window;  and  the  ivy  creeping  along  the 
northern  cloisters  falls  in  festoons  over  the  arches." 

All  this  is  romantic  enough ;  we  have  the  note  of  Catho- 
lic medievalism  and  the  note  of  Ossianic  melancholy 
combined;  and  this  some  years  before  "The  Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel,"  and  when  Byron  was  a  boy  of  fourteen  and 
still  reading  his  Ossian.*  But  we  are  precluded  from 
classifying  Chateaubriand  among  full-fledged  roman- 
ticists. His  literary  taste  was  by  no  means  emancipated 
from  eighteenth-century  standards.  In  speaking  of  Mil- 
ton, e.g.,  he  says  that  if  he  had  only  been  born  in  France 
in  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV.,  and  had  "combined  with 
the  native  grandeur  of  his  genius  the  taste  of  Racine  and 
Boileau,"  the  "Paradise  Lost"  might  have  equalled  the 
"Iliad." 

Chateaubriand  never  called  himself  a  romantic.  It  is 
agreed  upon  all  hands  that  the  expressions  romantisme 
and  litterature  romantique  were  first  invented  or  imported 
by  Madame  de  Stael  in  her  "L'Allemagne"  (1813), 
"pour  exprimer  l'affranchissement  des  vieilles  formes 
litteraires."  f  Some  ten  years  later,  or  by  1823,  when 
Stendhal  published  his" Racine et  Shakspere,"  the  issue 
between  the  schools  had  been  joined  and  the  question 

*For  Chateaubriand  and  Ossian  see  vol.  i.,  pp.  332-33.    He 
made  translations  from  Ossian,  Gray,  and  Milton, 
f  "Victor  Hugo,"  par  Paul  Boudois,  p.  32. 


The  Romantic  [Movement  in  France.  209 

quite  thoroughly  agitated  in  the  Parisian  journals. 
Stendhal  announced  himself  as  an  adherent  of  the  new, 
but  his  temper  was  decidedly  cool  and  unromantic.  I 
have  quoted  his  epigrammatic  definition  of  romanticism.* 

In  this  brochure  Stendhal  announces  that  France  is  on 
the  eve  of  a  literary  revolution  and  that  the  last  hour  of 
classicism  has  struck,  although  as  yet  the  classicists  are 
in  possession  of  the  theatres,  and  of  all  the  salaried  lit- 
erary positions  under  government;  and  all  the  newspapers 
of  all  shades  of  political  opinion  are  shut  to  the  roman- 
ticists. A  company  of  English  actors  who  attempted  to 
give  some  of  Shakspere's  plays  at  the  Porte-Saint-Martin 
in  1822  were  mobbed.  "The  hisses  and  cat-calls  began 
before  the  performance,  of  which  it  was  impossible  to 
hear  a  single  word.  As  soon  as  the  actors  appeared  they 
were  pelted  with  apples  and  eggs,  and  from  time  to  time 
the  audience  called  out  to  them  to  talk  French,  and 
shouted,  'A  bas  Shakspere  /  dest  un  aide  de  camp  du 
due  de  Wellington?  "  It  will  be  remembered  that  in  our 
own  day  the  first  representations  of  Wagner's  operas  at 
Paris  were  interrupted  with  similar  cries:  (t  Pas  de 
Wagner  /"     "  A  bas  les  Allemands  /"  etc. 

In  1827  Kemble's  company  visited  Paris  and  gave,  in 
English,  "  Hamlet,"  "  Romeo  and  Juliet,"  "  Othello,"  and 
"The  Merchant  of  Venice."  Dumas  went  to  see  them 
and  described  the  impression  made  upon  him  by  Shak- 
spere, in  language  identical  with  that  which  Goethe  used 
about  himself.f  He  was  like  a  man  born  blind  and  sud- 
denly restored  to  sight.  Dumas'  "  Henry  III."  (1829), 
a  drame  in  the  manner  of  Shakspere's  historical  plays, 

*Vol.  i.,  p.  10. 
fSee  vol.  i.,  p.  379. 


2  io  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

though  in  prose,  was  the  immediate  result  of  this  new 
vision.  English  actors  were  in  Paris  again  in  1828  and 
1829;  and  in  1835  Macready  presented  "Hamlet," 
"Othello,"  and  "Henry  IV."  with  great  success.  Pre- 
vious to  these  performances,  the  only  opportunities  that 
the  French  public  had  to  judge  of  Shakspere's  dramas  as 
acting  plays  were  afforded  by  the  wretched  adaptations 
of  Ducis  and  other  stage  carpenters.  Ducis  had  read 
Shakspere  only  in  Letourneur's  very  inadequate  transla- 
tion (revised  by  Guizot  in  182 1).  His  "Hamlet"  was 
played  in  1769;  "Macbeth,"  1784;  "  King  John,"  1791; 
"Othello"  (turned  into  a  comedy),  1792.  Mercier's 
"  Timon  "  was  given  in  1794 ;  and  Dejaure's  "  Imogenes  " 
— an  "arrangement"  of  "Cymbeline" — in  1796.  The 
romanticists  labored  to  put  their  countrymen  in  posses- 
sion of  better  versions  of  Shakspere.  Alfred  de  Vigny 
rendered  "  Othello  "  (1827),  and  Emile  Deschamps,  "  Ro- 
meo and  Juliet"  and  "Macbeth." 

Stendhal  interviewed  a  director  of  one  of  the  French 
theatres  and  tried  to  persuade  him  that  there  would  be 
money  in  it  for  any  house  which  would  have  the  courage 
to  give  a  season  of  romantic  tragedy.  But  the  director, 
who  seemed  to  be  a  liberal-minded  man,  assured  him  that 
until  some  stage  manager  could  be  found  rich  enough  to 
buy  up  the  dramatic  criticism  of  the  Constitutionnel  and 
two  or  three  other  newspapers,  the  law  students  and  med- 
ical students,  who  were  under  the  influence  of  those  jour- 
nals, would  never  suffer  the  play  to  get  as  far  as  the  third 
act.  "If  it  were  otherwise,"  he  said,  "don't  you  suppose 
that  we  would  have  tried  Schiller's  *  William  Tell '  ?  The 
police  would  have  cut  out  a  quarter  of  it;  one  of  our 
adapters  another  quarter ;  and  what  was  left  would  reach 


I 


The  l^pmantic  {Movement  in  France.         211 

a  hundred  representations,  provided  it  could  once  secure 
threes 

To  this  the  author  replied  that  the  immense  majority 
of  young  society  people  had  been  converted  to  romanti- 
cism by  the  eloquence  of  M.  Cousin. 

"Sir,"  said  the  director,  "your  young  society  people 
don't  go  into  the  parterre  to  engage  in  fisticuffs  [/aire  le 
coup  de  poing\>  and  at  the  theatre,  as  in  politics,  we  de- 
spise philosophers  who  don't  fight."  Stendhal  adds  that 
the  editors  of  influential  journals  found  their  interest 
in  this  state  of  things,  since  many  of  them  had  pieces  of 
their  own  on  the  stage,  written  of  course  in  alexandrine 
verse  and  on  the  classic  model ;  and  what  would  become 
of  these  masterpieces  if  Talma  should  ever  get  permission 
to  play  in  a  prose  translation  of  "  Macbeth,"  abridged, 
say,  one-third?  "I  said  one  day  to  one  of  these  gentle- 
men, 28,000,000  men,  i.e.,  18,000,000  in  England  and 
10,000,000  in  America,  admire  *  Macbeth  '  and  applaud  it 
a  hundred  times  a  year.  *  The  English,'  he  answered  me 
with  great  coolness,  '  cannot  have  real  eloquence  or  poetry 
truly  admirable ;  the  nature  of  their  language,  which  is 
not  derived  from  the  Latin,  makes  it  quite  impossible.' " 
A  great  part  of  "  Racine  et  Shakspere  "  is  occupied  with 
a  refutation  of  the  doctrine  of  the  unities  of  time  and 
place,  and  with  a  discussion  of  the  real  nature  of  dra- 
matic illusion,  on  which  their  necessity  was  supposed  to 
rest.  Stendhal  maintains  that  the  illusion  is  really 
stronger  in  Shakspere's  tragedies  than  in  Racine's.  It 
is  not  essential  here  to  reproduce  his  argument,  which  is 
the  same  that  is  familiar  to  us  in  Lessing  and  in  Cole- 
ridge, though  he  was  an  able  controversialist,  and  his  logic 
and  irony  give  a  freshness  to  the  treatment  of  this  hack- 


212  cA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

neyed  theme  which  makes  his  little  treatise  well  worth 
the  reading.  To  illustrate  the  nature  of  real  stage  illu- 
sion, he  says  that  last  year  (August,  1822)  a  soldier  in  a 
Baltimore  theatre,  seeing  Othello  about  to  kill  Desde- 
mona,  cried  out,  "It  shall  never  be  said  that  a  damned 
nigger  killed  a  white  woman  in  my  presence,"  and  at  the 
same  moment  fired  his  gun  and  broke  an  arm  of  the  actor 
who  was  playing  Othello.  "Eh  Men,  this  soldier  had 
illusion :  he  believed  that  the  action  which  was  passing 
on  the  stage  was  true." 

Stendhal  proposes  the  following  as  a  definition  of  ro- 
mantic tragedy :  "  It  is  written  in  prose ;  the  succession 
of  events  which  it  presents  to  the  eyes  of  the  spectators 
lasts  several  months,  and  they  happen  in  different  places." 
He  complains  that  the  French  comedies  are  not  funny, 
do  not  make  any  one  laugh ;  and  that  the  French  tragic 
dialogue  is  epic  rather  than  dramatic.  He  advises  his 
readers  to  go  and  see  Kean  in  "  Richard  "  and  "  Othello  " ; 
and  says  that  since  reading  Schlegel  and  Dennis  (!) 
he  has  a  great  contempt  for  the  French  critics.  He  ap- 
peals to  the  usages  of  the  German  and  English  stage  in 
disregarding  the  rules  of  Aristotle,  and  cites  the  great 
popularity  of  /waiter  Scott's  romances,  which,  he  says, 
are  nothing  more  than  romantic  tragedies  with  long  de- 
scriptions interspersed,]  to  support  his  plea  for  a  new 
kind  of  French  prose-tragedy ;  for  which  he  recommends 
subjects  taken  from  national  history,  and  especially  from 
the  mediaeval  chroniclers  like  Froissart.  Nevertheless, 
he  does  not  advise  the  direct  imitation  of  Shakspere. 
He  blames  Schiller  for  copying  Shakspere,  and  eulogizes 
Werner's  "Luther"  as  nearer  to  the  masterpieces  of 
Shakspere  than  Schiller's  tragedies  are.     He  wants  the 


The  ^Romantic  ^Movement  in  France.  213 

new  French  drama  to  resemble  Shakspere  only  in  dealing 
freely  with  modern  conditions,  as  the  latter  did  with  the 
conditions  of  his  time,  without  having  the  fear  of  Racine 
or  any  other  authority  before  its  eyes. 

In  1824  the  Academy,  which  was  slowly  constructing 
its  famous  dictionary  of  the  French  language,  happened 
to  arrive  at  the  new  word  romanticism  which  needed  defin- 
ing. This  was  the  signal  for  a  heated  debate  in  that  ven- 
erable body,  and  the  director,  M.  Auger,  was  commis- 
sioned to  prepare  a  manifesto  against  the  new  literary 
sect,  to  be  read  at  the  meeting  of  the  Institute  on  the 
24th  of  April  next.  It  was  in  response  to  this  manifesto 
that  Stendhal  wrote  the  second  part  of  his  "  Racine  et 
Shakspere"  (1825),  attached  to  which  is  a  short  essay  en- 
titled "  Qu'est  ce  que  le  Romanticisme  ? "  *  addressed  to  the 
Italian  public,  and  intended  to  explain  to  them  the  literary 
situation  in  France,  and  to  enlist  their  sympathies  on  the 
romantic  side.  "  Shakspere,"  he  says,  "  the  hero  of  roman- 
tic poetry,  as  opposed  to  Racine,  the  god  of  the  classicists, 
wrote  for  strong  souls ;  for  English  hearts  which  were  what 
Italian  hearts  were  about  1500,  emerging  from  that  sub- 
lime Middle  Age  questi  tempi  della  virtu  sconosciutta" 
Racine,  on  the  contrary,  wrote  for  a  slavish  and  effem- 
inate court.  The  author  disclaims  any  wish  to  impose 
Shakspere  on  the  Italians.  The  day  will  come,  he  hopes, 
when  they  will  have  a  national  tragedy  of  their  own ;  but 
to  have  that,  they  will  do  better  to  follow  in  the  footprints 
of  Shakspere  than,  like  Alfieri,  in  the  footprints  of  Ra- 
cine. In  spite  of  the  pedants,  he  predicts  that  Germany 
and  England  will  carry  it  over  France;  Shakspere,  Schil- 

*  The  use  of  this  form  instead  of  romantisme  is  perhaps 
worth  noticing. 


2i4  ^  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

ler,  and  Lord  Byron  will  carry  it  over  Racine  and  Boileau. 
He  says  that  English  poetry  since  the  French  Revolution 
has  become  more  enthusiastic,  more  serious,  more  pas- 
sionate. It  needed  other  subjects  than  those  required  by 
the  witty  and  frivolous  eighteenth  century,  and  sought 
its  heroes  in  the  rude,  primitive,  inventive  ages,  or  even 
among  savages  and  barbarians.  It  had  to  have  recourse 
to  time  or  countries  when  it  was  permitted  to  the  higher 
classes  of  society  to  have  passions.  The  Greek  and  Latin 
classics  could  give  no  help;  since  most  of  them  belonged 
to  an  epoch  as  artificial,  and  as  far  removed  from  the 
naive  presentation  of  the  passions,  as  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury itself.  The  court  of  Augustus  was  no  more  natural 
than  that  of  Louis  XIV.  Accordingly  the  most  suc- 
cessful poets  in  England,  during  the  past  twenty  years, 
have  not  only  sought  deeper  emotions  than  those  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  but  have  treated  subjects  which  would 
have  been  scornfully  rejected  by  the  age  of  be  I  esprit 
The  anti-romantics  can't  cheat  us  much  longer.  "  Where, 
among  the  works  of  our  Italian  pedants,  are  the  books 
that  go  through  seven  editions  in  two  months,  like  the 
romantic  poems  that  are  coming  out  in  London  at  the 
present  moment?  Compare,  e.g.,  the  success  of  Moore's 
*  Lalla  Rookh,'  which  appeared  in  June,  1817,  and  the 
eleventh  edition  of  which  I  have  before  me,  with  the  suc- 
cess of  the  *  Camille '  of  the  highly  classical  Mr.  Botta ! ' " 
In  1822,  a  year  before  the  appearance  of  Stendhal's 
"  Racine  et  Shakspere,"  Victor  Hugo  had  published  his 
"  Odes  et  Poesies  Diverses,"  and  a  second  collection  fol- 
lowed in  1824.  In  the  prefaces  to  these  two  volumes  he 
protests  against  the  use  of  the  terms  classic  and  romantic, 
as  mots  de  guerre  and  vague  words  which  every  one  defines 


The  Romantic  {Movement  in  France.         215 

in  accordance  with  his  own  prejudices.  If  romanticism 
means  anything,  he  says,  it  means  the  literature  of  the 
nineteenth  century;  and  all  the  anathemas  launched  at 
the  heads  of  contemporary  writers  reduce  themselves  to 
the  following  method  of  argument.  "  We  condemn  the 
literature  of  the  nineteenth  century  because  it  is  roman- 
tic. And  why  is  it  romantic?  Because  it  is  the  litera- 
ture of  the  nineteenth  century."  As  to  the  false  taste 
which  disfigured  the  eighteenth-century  imitations  of 
Racine  and  Boileau,  he  would  prefer  to  distinguish  that 
by  the  name  scholastic,  a  style  which  is  to  the  truly 
classic  what  superstition  and  fanaticism  are  to  religion. 
The  intention  of  these  youthful  poems  of  Hugo  was  partly 
literary  and  partly  political  and  religious:  "The  history 
of  mankind  affords  no  poetry,"  he  says,  "except  when 
judged  from  the  vantage-ground  of  monarchical  ideas 
and  religious  beliefs.  .  .  .  He  has  thought  that  ...  in 
substituting  for  the  outworn  and  false  colours  of  pagan 
mythology  the  new  and  truthful  colours  of  the  Christian 
theogony,  one  could  inject  into  the  ode  something  of  the 
interest  of  the  drama,  and  could  make  it  speak,  besides, 
that  austere,  consoling,  and  religious  language  which  is 
needed  by  an  old  society  that  issues  still  trembling  from 
the  saturnalia  of  atheism  and  anarchy.  .  .  .  The  litera- 
ture of  the  present,  the  actual  literature,  is  the  expression, 
by  way  of  anticipation,  of  that  religious  and  monarchical 
society  which  will  issue,  doubtless,  from  the  midst  of  so 
many  ancient  debris,  of  so  many  recent  ruins.  ...  If 
the  literature  of  the  great  age  of  Louis  XIV.  had  invoked 
Christianity  in  place  of  worshipping  heathen  gods  .  .  . 
the  triumph  of  the  sophistical  doctrines  of  the  last  cen- 
tury would  have  been  much  more  difficult,  perhaps  even 


/ 


216  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

impossible.  .  .  .  But  France  had  not  that  good  fortune; 
its  national  poets  were  almost  all  pagan  poets;  and  our 
literature  was  rather  the  expression  of  an  idolatrous  and 
democratic,  than  of  a  monarchical  and  Christian  society." 
The  prevailing  note,  accordingly,  in  these  early  odes  is 
that  of  the  Bourbon  Restoration  of  1815-30,  and  of  the 
Catholic  reaction  against  the  sceptical  ltdaircissement  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  The  subjects  are  such  as  these  : 
"  The  Poet  in  the  Times  of  Revolution  " ;  "  La  Vende'e  "  ; 
"  The  Maidens  of  Verdun,"  which  chants  the  martyrdom 
of  three  young  royalist  sisters  who  were  put  to  death  for 
sending  money  and  supplies  to  the  emigre's  ;  "  Quibiron," 
where  a  royalist  detachment  which  had  capitulated  under 
promise  of  being  treated  like  prisoners  of  war,  were  shot 
down  in  squads  by  the  Convention  soldiery;  "Louis 
XVII.";  "The  Replacement  of  the  Statue  of  Henry 
IV.";  "The  Death  of  the  Duke  of  Berry";  "The  Birth 
of  the  Duke  of  Bourdeaux  "  and  his  "  Baptism  " ;  "  The 
Funeral  of  Louis  XVIII." ;  "  The  Consecration  of  Charles 
X." ;  "  The  Death  of  Mile,  de  Sombreuil,"  the  royalist 
heroine  who  saved  her  father's  life  by  drinking  a  cupful 
of  human  blood  in  the  days  of  the  Terror;  and  "La 
Bande  Noire,"  which  denounces  with  great  bitterness  the 
violation  of  the  tombs  of  the  kings  of  France  by  the 
regicides,  and  pleads  for  the  preservation  of  the  ruins  of 
feudal  times : 

"  O  murs  !  6  creneaux  !  6  tourelles  ! 
Remparts,  fosses  aux  ponts  mouvants  ! 
Lourds  faisceaux  de  colonnes  freles  ! 
Fiers  chateaux  !  modestes  couvents  ! 
Cloitres  poudreux,  salles  antiques, 
Ou  gemissaient  les  saints  cantiques, 
Ou  riaient  les  banquets  joyeux  ! 
Lieux  ou  le  coeur  met  ses  chimeres  ! 


The  Ttymantic  (Movement  in  France.  217 

feglises  ou  priaient  nos  meres 
Tours  ou  combattaient  nos  aieux  !  " 

In  these  two  ode  collections,  though  the  Catholic  and 
legitimist  inspiration  is  everywhere  apparent,  there  is 
nothing  revolutionary  in  the  language  or  verse  forms. 
But  in  the  "Odes  et  Ballades"  of  1826,  "the  romantic 
challenge,"  says  Saintsbury,  "  is  definitely  thrown  down. 
The  subjects  are  taken  by  preference  from  times  and 
countries  which  the  classical  tradition  had  regarded  as 
barbarous.  The  metres  and  rhythm  are  studiously 
broken,  varied,  and  irregular;  the  language  has  the  ut- 
most possible  glow  of  colour,  as  opposed  to  the  cold  cor- 
rectness of  classical  poetry,  the  completest  disdain  of 
conventional  periphrasis,  the  boldest  reliance  on  exotic 
terms  and  daring  neologisms."  This  description  applies 
more  particularly  to  the  Ballades,  many  of  which,  such 
as  "  La  Ronde  du  Sabbat,"  "  La  Legende  de  la  Nonne," 
"  La  Chasse  du  Burgrave,"  and  "  Le  Pas  d'Armes  du  Roi 
Jean  "  are  mediaeval  studies  in  which  the  lawless  grotes- 
querie  of  Gothic  art  runs  riot.  "  The  author,  in  compos- 
ing them,"  says  the  preface,  "  has  tried  to  give  some  idea 
of  what  the  poems  of  the  first  troubadours  of  the  Middle 
Ages  might  have  been ;  those  Christian  rhapsodists  who 
had  nothing  in  the  world  but  their  swords  and  their  gui- 
tars, and  went  from  castle  to  castle  paying  for  their  en- 
tertainment with  their  songs."  To  show  that  liberty  in 
art  does  not  mean  disorder,  the  author  draws  an  elaborate 
contrast  between  the  garden  of  Versailles  and  a  primitive 
forest,  in  a  passage  which  will  remind  the  reader  of  sim- 
ilar comparisons  in  the  writings  of  Shenstone,  Walpole, 
and  other  English  romanticists  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
There  is  as  much  order,  he  asserts,  in  the  forest  as  in  the 


218  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

garden,  but  it  is  a  live  order,  not  a  dead  regularity. 
"  Choose  then,"  he  exclaims,  "  between  the  masterpiece 
of  gardening  and  the  work  of  nature ;  between  that  which 
is  beautiful  by  convention  and  that  which  is  beautiful 
without  rule;  between  an  artificial  literature  and  an  orig- 
inal poetry.  ...  In  two  words — and  we  shall  not  object 
to  have  judgment  passed  in  accordance  with  this  observa- 
tion on  the  two  kinds  of  literature  that  are  called  classic 
and  romantic, — regularity  is  the  taste  of  mediocrity,  order 
is  the  taste  of  genius.  ...  It  will  be  objected  to  us  that 
the  virgin  forest  hides  in  its  magnificent  solitudes  a  thou- 
sand dangerous  animals,  while  the  marshy  basins  of  the 
French  garden  conceal  at  most  a  few  harmless  creatures. 
That  is  doubtless  a  misfortune ;  but,  taking  it  all  in  all, 
we  like  a  crocodile  better  than  a  frog;  we  prefer  a  bar- 
barism of  Shakspere  to  an  insipidity  of  Campistron." 
But  above  all  things — such  is  the  doctrine  of  this  preface 
— do  not  imitate  anybody — not  Shakspere  any  more  than 
Racine.  "He  who  imitates  a  romantic  poet  becomes 
thereby  a  classicf  and  just  because  he  imitates."  In  1823 
Hugo  had  published  anonymously  his  first  prose  romance, 
"  Han  dTslande,"  the  story  of  a  Norwegian  bandit.  He 
got  up  the  local  colour  for  this  by  a  careful  study  of  the 
Edda  and  the  Sagas,  that  "  poesie  sauvage "  which  was 
the  admiration  of  the  new  school  and  the  horror  of  the 
old.  But  it  was  in  the  preface  to  "  Cromwell,"  published 
in  1827,  that  Hugo  issued  the  full  and,  as  it  were,  offi- 
cial manifesto  of  romanticism.  The  play  itself  is  hardly 
actable.  It  is  modelled,  in  a  sense,  upon  the  historical 
plays  of  Shakspere,  but  its  Cromwell  is  a  very  melodra- 
matic person,  and  its  Puritans  and  Cavaliers  strike  the 
English  reader  with  the  same  sense  of  absurdity  produced 


The  Ttymantic  {Movement  in  France.  219 

by  the  pictures  of  English  society  in  "L'Homme  qui 
Rit."  But  of  the  famous  preface  Gautier  says :  "  The 
Bible  among  Protestants,  the  Koran  among  Mahometans 
are  not  the  object  of  a  deeper  veneration.  It  was,  in- 
deed, for  us  the  book  of  books,  the  book  which  contained 
the  pure  doctrine."  It  consisted  in  great  part  of  a  tri- 
umphant attack  upon  the  unities,  and  upon  the  verse  and 
style  which  classic  usage  had  consecrated  to  French  trag^ 
edy.  I  need  not  repeat  the  argument  here.  It  is  already 
familiar,  and  some  sentences  *  from  this  portion  of  the 
essay  I  have  quoted  elsewhere. 

The  preface  also  contained  a  plea  for  another  peculiar- 
ity of  the  romantic  drama,  its  mixture,  viz.,  of  tragedy 
and  comedy.  According  to  Hugo,  this  is  the  character- 
istic trait,  the  fundamental  difference,  which  separates 
modern  from  ancient  art,  romantic  from  classical  litera- 
ture. Antique  art,  he  says,  rejected  everything  which 
was  not  purely  beautiful,  but  the  Christian  and  modern 
spirit  feels  that  there  are  many  things  in  creation  besides 
that  which  is,  humanly  speaking,  beautiful;  and  that 
everything  which  is  in  nature  is — or  has  the  right  to  be 
— in  art.  It  includes  in  its  picture  of  life  the  ugly,  the 
misshapen,  the  monstrous.  Hence  results  a  new  type, 
the  grotesque,  and  a  new  literary  form,  romantic  comedy. 
He  proceeds  to  illustrate  this  thesis  with  his  usual  wealth 
of  imaginative  detail  and  pictorial  language.  The  Mid- 
dle Ages,  more  than  any  other  period,  are  rich  in  in- 
stances of  that  intimate  blending  of  the  comic  and  the 
horrible  which  we  call  the  grotesque ;  the  witches'  Sab- 
bath, the  hoofed  and  horned  devil,  the  hideous  figures  of 
Dante's  hell;  the  Scaramouches,  Crispins,  Harlequins 
*  See  vol.  i.,  pp.  19-20. 


220  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

of  Italian  farce;  "grimacing  silhouettes  of  man,  quite 
unknown  to  grave  antiquity  " ;  and  "  all  those  local  drag- 
ons of  our  legends,  the  gargoyle  of  Rouen,  the  Taras  of 
Tarascon,  etc.  .  .  .  The  contact  of  deformity  has  given 
to  the  modern  sublime  something  purer,  grander,  more 
sublime,  in  short,  than  the  antique  beauty.  ...  Is  it  not 
because  the  modern  imagination  knows  how  to  set  prowl- 
ing hideously  about  our  churchyards,  the  vampires,  the 
ogres,  theerl-kings,  the  psylles,  the  ghouls,  the  brucolaques, 
the  aspioles,  that  it  is  able  to  give  its  fays  that  bodiless 
form,  that  purity  of  essence  which  the  pagan  nymphs  ap- 
proach so  little?  The  antique  Venus  is  beautiful,  admir- 
able, no  doubt;  but  what  has  spread  over  the  figures  of 
Jean  Goujon  that  graceful,  strange,  airy  elegance?  What 
has  given  them  that  unfamiliar  character  of  life  and 
grandeur,  unless  it  be  the  neighbourhood  of  the  rude  and 
strong  carvings  of  the  Middle  Ages  ?  .  .  .  The  grotesque 
imprints  its  character  especially  upon  that  wonderful 
architecture  which  in  the  Middle  Ages  takes  the  place  of 
all  the  arts.  It  attaches  its  marks  to  the  fronts  of  the 
cathedrals ;  enframes  its  hells  and  purgatories  under  the 
portal  arches,  and  sets  them  aflame  upon  the  windows; 
unrolls  its  monsters,  dogs,  demons  around  the  capitals, 
along  the  friezes,  on  the  eaves."  We  find  this  same  bi- 
zarre note  in  the  mediaeval  laws,  social  usages,  church 
institutions,  and  popular  legends,  in  the  court  fools,  in 
the  heraldic  emblems,  the  religious  processions,  the  story 
of  "  Beauty  and  the  Beast."  It  explains  the  origin  of  the 
Shaksperian  drama,  the  high-water  mark  of  modern  art. 

Shakspere  does  not  seem  to  me  an  artist  of  the  gro- 
tesque. He  is  by  turns  the  greatest  of  tragic  and  the 
greatest  of  comic  artists,  and  his  tragedy  and  comedy  lie 


The  cRptnantic  [Movement  in  France.  221 

close  together,  as  in  life,  but  without  that  union  of  the 
terrible  and  the  ludicrous  in  the  same  figure,  and  that 
element  of  deformity  which  is  the  essence  of  the  proper 
grotesque.  He  has  created,  however,  one  specimen  of 
true  grotesque,  the  monster  Caliban.  Caliban  is  a  comic 
figure,  but  not  purely  comic;  there  is  something  savage, 
uncouth,  and  frightful  about  him.  He  has  the  dignity 
and  the  poetry  which  all  rude,  primitive  beings  have: 
which  the  things  of  nature,  rocks  and  trees  and  wild 
beasts  have.  It  is  significant,  therefore,  that  Robert 
Browning  should  have  been  attracted  to  Caliban.  Brown- 
ing had  little  comic  power,  little  real  humour;  in  him  the 
grotesque  is  an  imperfect  form  of  the  comic.  The  same 
criticism  applies  to  Hugo.  He  gave  a  capital  example 
of  the  grotesque  in  the  four  fools  in  the  third  act  of 
"  Cromwell "  and  in  Triboulet,  the  Shaksperian  jester  of 
"  Le  Roi  s'Amuse."  Their  songs  and  dialogues  are  bi- 
zarre and  fantastic  in  the  highest  degree,  but  they  are 
not  funny;  they  do  not  make  us  laugh  like  the  clowns 
of  Shakspere — they  are  not  comic,  but  merely  queer. 
Hugo's  defective  sense  of  humour  is  shown  in  the  way 
in  which  he  frequently  takes  that  one  step  which,  Napo- 
leon said,  separates  the  sublime  from  the  ridiculous — 
exaggerating  character  and  motive  till  the  heroic  passes 
into  melodrama  and  melodrama  into  absurdity.  This 
fault  is  felt  in  his  great  prose  romance  "  Notre-Dame  de 
Paris"  (183 1),  a  picture  of  mediaeval  Paris,  in  which  the 
humpback  Quasimodo  affords  an  exact  illustration  of 
what  the  author  meant  by  the  grotesque ;  another  of  the 
same  kind  is  furnished  by  the  hero  of  his  later  romance 
"L'Homme  qui  Rit." 

Gautier  has  left  a  number  of  sketches,  written  in  a  vein 


222  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

lovingly  humorous,  of  some  of  the  eccentrics — the  curi- 
osites  romantiques — whose  oddities  are  perhaps  even  more 
instructive  as  to  the  many  directions  which  the  movement 
took,  than  the  more  ordered  enthusiasm  of  the  less  ex- 
treme votaries.  There  was  the  architect  Jule  Vabre,  e.g., 
whose  specialty  was  Shakspere.  Shakspere  "was  his 
god,  his  idol,  his  passion,  a  wonder  to  which  he  could 
never  grow  accustomed."  Vabre's  life-project  was  a 
French  translation  of  his  idol,  which  should  be  absolutely 
true  to  the  text,  reproducing  the  exact  turn  and  move- 
ment of  the  phrase,  following  the  alternations  of  prose, 
rime,  and  blank  verse  in  the  original,  and  shunning 
neither  its  euphemistic  subtleties  nor  its  barbaric  rough- 
nesses. To  fit  himself  for  this  task,  he  went  to  London 
and  lived  there,  striving  to  submit  himself  to  the  atmos- 
phere and  the  milieu,  and  learning  to  think  in  English ; 
and  there  Gautier  encountered  him  about  1843,  in  a  tav- 
ern at  High-Holborn,  drinking  stout  and  eating  rosbif 
and  speaking  French  with  an  English  accent.  Gautier 
told  him  that  all  he  had  to  do  now,  to  translate  Shak- 
spere, was  to  learn  French.  "  I  am  going  to  work  at  it," 
he  answered,  more  struck  with  the  wisdom  than  the  wit 
of  the  suggestion.  A  few  years  later  Vabre  turned  up  in 
France  with  a  project  for  a  sort  of  international  seminary. 
"  He  wanted  to  explain  '  Hernani '  to  the  English  and 
4  Macbeth '  to  the  French.  It  made  him  tired  to  see  the 
English  learning  French  in  '  Telemaque,'  and  the  French 
learning  English  in  the  '  Vicar  of  Wakefield.' "  Poor 
Vabre's  great  Shakspere  translation  never  materialised ; 
but  Francois-Victor  Hugo,  the  second  son  of  the  great 
romancer,  carried  out  many  of  Vabre's  principles  of  trans- 
lation in  his  version  of  Shakspere. 


The  'Romantic  (Movement  in  France.  223 

Another  curious  figure  was  the  water-colour  painter, 
Celestin  Nanteuil,  who  suggested  to  Gautier  the  hero  of 
an  early  piece  of  his  own,  written  to  accompany  an  en- 
graving in  an  English  keepsake,  representing  the  Square 
of  St.  Sebald  at  Nuremberg.  This  hero,  Elias  Wildman- 
stadius,  or  PHomme  Moyen-age,  was  "  in  a  sort,  the 
Gothic  genius  of  that  Gothic  town  " — a  retardataire  or 
man  born  out  of  his  own  time — who  should  have  been 
born  in  1460,  in  the  days  of  Albrecht  Diirer.  Ce'lestin 
Nanteuil  "  had  the  air  of  one  of  those  tall  angels  carry- 
ing a  censer  or  playing  on  the  sambucque,  who  inhabit 
the  gable  ends  of  cathedrals;  and  he  seemed  to  have 
come  down  into  the  city  among  the  busy  townsfolk,  still 
wearing  his  nimbus  plate  behind  his  head  in  place  of  a 
hat,  and  without  having  the  least  suspicion  that  it  is  not 
perfectly  natural  to  wear  one's  aureole  in  the  street." 
He  is  described  as  resembling  in  figure  "  the  spindling 
columns  of  the  church  naves  of  the  fifteenth  century.  .  .  . 
The  azure  of  the  frescoes  of  Fiesole  had  furnished  the 
blue  of  his  eyes;  his  hairs,  of  the  blond  of  an  aureole, 
seemed  painted  one  by  one,  with  the  gold  of  the  illumi- 
nators of  the  Middle  Ages.  .  .  .  One  would  have  said, 
that  from  the  height  of  his  Gothic  pinnacle  Celestin 
Nanteuil  overlooked  the  actual  town,  hovering  above  the 
sea  of  roofs,  regarding  the  eddying  blue  smoke,  perceiving 
the  city  squares  like  a  checkerboard,  the  streets  like  the 
notches  of  a  saw  in  a  stone  bench,  the  passers-by  like 
mice;  but  all  that  confusedly  athwart  the  haze,  while 
from  his  airy  observatory  he  saw,  close  at  hand  and  in  all 
their  detail,  the  rose  windows,  the  bell  towers  bristling 
with  crosses,  the  kings,  patriarchs,  prophets,  saints,  angels 
of  all  the  orders,  the  whole  monstrous  army  of  demons 


224  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

or  chimeras,  nailed,  scaled,  tushed,  hideously  winged; 
guivres,  taresques,  gargoyles,  asses'  heads,  apes'  muzzles, 
all  the  strange  bestiary  of  the  Middle  Age."  Nanteuil 
furnished  illustrations  for  the  books  of  the  French  ro- 
manticists. "  Hugo's  *  Notre-Dame  de  Paris '  was  the 
object  of  his  most  fervent  admiration,  and  he  drew  from 
it  subjects  for  a  large  number  of  designs  and  aquarelles." 
Gautier  mentions,  as  among  his  rarest  vignettes,  the 
frontispiece  of  "  Albertus,"  recalling  Rembrandt's  man- 
ner; and  his  view  of  the  Palazzo  of  San  Marc  in  Royer's 
"  Venezia  la  bella."  Gautier  says  that  one  might  apply 
to  Nanteuil's  aquarelles  what  Joseph  Delorme*  said  of 
Hugo's  ballads,  that  they  were  Gothic  window  paintings. 
"  The  essential  thing  in  these  short  fantasies  is  the  car- 
riage, the  shape,  the  clerical,  monastic,  royal,  seignorial 
awkwardness  of  the  figures  and  their  high  colouring.  .  .  . 
Celestin  had  made  his  own  the  angular  anatomy  of  coats- 
of-arms,  the  extravagant  contours  of  the  mantles,  the  chi- 
merical or  monstrous  figures  of  heraldry,  the  branchings 
of  the  emblazoned  skirts,  the  lofty  attitude  of  the  feudal 
baron,  the  modest  air  of  the  chatelaine,  the  sanctimonious 
physiognomy  of  the  big  Carthusian  Carmelite,  the  furtive 
mien  of  the  young  page  with  parti-coloured  pantaloons. 
.  .  .  He  excelled  also  in  setting  the  persons  of  poem, 
drama,  or  romance  in  ornamented  frames  like  the  Gothic 
shrines  with  triple  colonettes,  arches,  canopied  and 
bracketed  niches,  with  statuettes,  figurines,  emblematic 
animals,  male  and  female  saints  on  a  background  of  gold. 
He  entered  so  deeply  into  the  sentiment  of  the  old  Gothic 
imagery  that  he  could  make  a  Lady  of  the  Pillar  in  a 
brocade  dalmatica,  a  Mater  Dolorosa  with  the  seven 
*Sainte-Beuve's  "Confessions  de  Joseph  Delorme,"  1829. 


The  Romantic  {Movement  in  France.  225 

swords  in  her  breast,  a  St.  Christopher  with  the  child 
Jesus  on  his  shoulder  and  leaning  on  a  palm  tree,  worthy 
to  serve  as  types  to  the  Byzantine  painters  of  Epinal.  .  .  . 
Nothing  resembled  less  the  clock  face  and  troubadour 
Middle  Age  which  flourished  about  1825.  It  is  one  of 
the  main  services  of  the  romantic  school  to  have  thor- 
oughly disembarrassed  art  from  this."  Gautier  describes 
also  a  manuscript  piece  of  Nerval,  for  which  he  furnished 
a  prologue,  and  which  was  an  imitation  of  one  of  the 
Diableries,  or  popular  farces  of  the  Middle  Ages,  in  which 
the  devil  was  introduced.  It  contained  a  piece  within 
the  piece,  in  the  fashion  of  an  old  mystery  play,  with 
scenery  consisting  of  the  mouth  of  hell,  painted  red  and 
surmounted  by  a  blue  paradise  starred  with  gold.  An 
angel  came  down  to  play  at  dice  with  the  devil  for  souls. 
In  his  excess  of  zeal,  the  angel  cheated  and  the  devil 
grew  angry  and  called  him  a  "big  booby,  a  celestial 
fowl,"  and  threatened  to  pull  his  feathers  out  ("  Le  Prince 
des  Sots  "). 

In  France,  as  in  England  and  Germany,  the  romantic 
revival  promoted  and  accompanied  works  of  erudition  like 
Raynouard's  researches  in  Provencal  and  old  French 
philology  and  the  poetry  of  the  troubadours  (1816); 
Creuze'  de  Lesser's  "Chevaliers  de  la  Table  Ronde"; 
Marchangy's  "  La  Gaule  Poetique."  History  took  new 
impulse  from  that  sens  du  passe  which  romanticism  did  so 
much  to  awaken.  Augustin  Thierry's  obligations  to  Scott 
have  already  been  noticed.  It  was  the  war  chant  of  the 
Frankish  warriors  in  Chateaubriand's  "Les  Martyrs" — 

"  Pharamond  !    Pharamond  !  nous  avons  combattu  avec 
l'6p€e  " — 

which  first  excited  his  historical  imagination  and  started 


226  fiA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

him  upon  the  studies  which  issued  in  the  "  Re'cits  Mero- 
vingiens  "  and  the  "  Conquete  d'Angleterre."  Barante's 
"Dues  de  Bourgogne"  (1814-28)  confessedly  owes  much 
of  its  inception  to  Scott.  Michaud's  "  History  of  the 
Crusades"  (181 1-22)  and  the  "History  of  France" 
(1833-67)  by  that  most  romantic  of  historians,  Michelet, 
may  also  be  credited  to  the  romantic  movement.  The 
end  of  the  movement,  as  a  definite  period  in  the  history 
of  French  literature,  is  commonly  dated  from  the  failure 
upon  the  stage  of  Victor  Hugo's  "Les  Burgraves"  in 
1843.  The  immediate  influence  of  the  French  romantic 
school  upon  English  poetry  or  prose  was  slight.  Like 
the  German  school,  it  came  too  late.  The  first  genera- 
tion of  English  romantics  was  drawing  to  its  close.  Scott 
died  two  years  after  "  Hernani "  stormed  the  French  the- 
atre. Two  years  later  still  died  Coleridge,  long  since 
fallen  silent  —  as  a  poet  —  and  always  deaf  to  Gallic 
charming.  We  shall  find  the  first  impress  of  French 
romance  among  younger  men  and  in  the  latter  half  cen- 
tury. 

In  France  itself  the  movement  passed  on  into  other 
phases.  Many  early  adherents  of  Hugo's  dnacle  and 
entourage  fell  away  from  their  allegiance  and,  like  Sainte- 
Beuve  and  Musset,  took  up  a  critical  or  even  antagonis- 
tic attitude.  Musset's  "  Lettres  de  Dupuis  et  Cotonet "  * 
turns  the  whole  romantic  contention  into  mockery.  Yet 
no  work  more  fantastically  and  gracefully  romantic,  more 
Shaksperian  in  quality,  was  produced  by  any  member  of 
the  school  than  Musset  produced  in  such  dramas  as 
"  Fantasio  "  and  "  Lorenzaccio." 

*See  vol.  i.,  pp.  18-23. 


CHAPTER   VI. 

Diffused  'Romanticism  in  tbe  literature  of  tbe  *Une* 
teentb  Century. 

Most  of  the  poetry  of  the  century  that  has  just  closed 
has  been  romantic  in  the  wider  or  looser  acceptation  of 
the  term.  Emotional  stress,  sensitiveness  to  the  pictur- 
esque, love  of  natural  scenery,  interest  in  distant  times 
and  places,  curiosity  of  the  wonderful  and  mysterious, 
subjectivity,  lyricism,  intrusion  of  the  ego,  impatience  of 
the  limits  of  the  genres,  eager  experiment  with  new  f6rms 
of  art — these  and  the  like  marks  of  the  romantic  spirit' are 
as  common  in  the  verse  literature  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury as  they  are  rare  in  that  of  the  eighteenth.  The  same 
is  true  of  imaginative  prose,  particularly  during  the  first 
half  of  the  century,  the  late  Georgian  and  early  Victorian 
period.  In  contrast  with  Addison,  Swift,  and  Goldsmith, 
De  Quincey,  Carlyle,  and  Ruskin  are  romanticists.  In 
contrast  with  Hume,  Macaulay  is  romantic,  concrete,  pic- 
torial. The  critical  work  of  Hazlitt  and  Lamb  was  in 
line  with  Coleridge's.  They  praised  the  pre-Augustan 
writers,  the  Elizabethan  dramatists,  the  seventeenth-cen- 
tury humorists  and  moralists,  the  Sidneian  amourists 
and  fanciful  sonneteers,  at  the  expense  of  their  classical 
successors. 

But  in  the  narrower  sense  of  the  word — the  sense  which 
controls  in  these  inquiries — the  great  romantic  generation 

227 


228  iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

ended  virtually  with  the  death  of  Scott  in  1832.  Cole- 
ridge followed  in  1834,  Wordsworth  in  1850.  Both  had 
long  since  ceased  to  contribute  anything  of  value  to  im- 
aginative literature.  Byron,  Shelley,  and  Keats  had  died 
some  years  before  Coleridge ;  Leigh  Hunt  survived  until 
1859.  The  mediaevalism  of  Coleridge,  Scott,  and  Keats 
lived  on  in  dispersed  fashion  till  it  condensed  itself  a 
second  time,  and  with  redoubled  intensity,  in  the  work 
of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood,  which  belongs  to  the 
last  half  of  the  century.  The  direct  line  of  descent  was 
from  Keats  to  Rossetti;  and  the  Pre-Raphaelites  bear 
very  much  such  a  relation  to  the  elder  group,  as  the  ro- 
mantic school  proper  in  Germany  bears  to  Burger  and 
Herder,  and  to  Goethe  and  Schiller  in  their  younger 
days.  That  is  to  say,  their  mediaevalism  was  more  con- 
centrated, more  exclusive,  and  more  final. 

We  have  come  to  a  point  in  the  chronology  of  our  sub- 
ject where  the  material  is  so  abundant  that  we  must  nar- 
row the  field  of  study  to  creative  work,  and  to  work  which 
is  romantic  in  the  strictest  meaning.  Henceforth  we 
may  leave  out  of  account' all  works  of  mere  erudition  as 
such ;  all  those  helps  which  the  scholarship  of  the  cen- 
tury has  furnished  to  a  knowledge  of  the  Middle  Ages : 
histories,  collections,  translations,  reprints  of  old  texts, 
critical  editions,  Middle  English  lexicons  and  grammars, 
studies  of  special  subjects,  such  as  popular  myths  or 
miracle  plays  or  the  Arthurian  legends,  and  the  like. 
Numerous  and  valuable  as  these  publications  have  been, 
they  concern  us  only  indirectly.  They  have  swelled  the 
material  available  for  the  student;  they  have  not  neces- 
sarily stimulated  the  imagination  of  the  poet;  which 
sometimes — as  in  the  case  of  Chatterton  and  of  Keats — 


THffused  %omanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    229 

goes  off  at  a  touch  and  carries  but  a  light  charge  of 
learning.  In  literary  history  it  is  the  beginnings  that 
count.  Child's  great  ballad  collection  is,  beyond  com- 
parison, more  important  from  the  scholar's  point  of  view 
than  Percy's  "Reliques."  But  in  the  history  of  roman- 
ticism it  is  of  less  importance,  because  it  came  a  century 
later.  Mallet's  "  Histoire  de  Dannemarc  "  has  been  long 
since  superseded,  and  the  means  now  accessible  in  Eng- 
lish for  a  study  of  Norse  mythology  are  infinitely  greater 
than  when  Gray  read  and  Percy  translated  the  "  North- 
ern Antiquities."  But  it  is  not  the  history  of  the  revival 
of  the  knowledge  of  mediaeval  life  that  we  are  following 
here;  it  is  rather  the  history  of  that  part  of  our  modern 
creative  literature  which  has  been  kindled  by  contact — 
perhaps  a  very  slight  and  casual  contact — with  the  trans- 
mitted image  of  mediaeval  life. 

Nor  need  we  concern  ourselves  further  with  literary 
criticism  or  the  history  of  opinion.  This  was  worth 
considering  in  the  infancy  of  the  movement,  when  War- 
ton  began  to  question  the  supremacy  of  Pope;  when 
Hurd  asserted  the  fitness  for  the  poet's  uses  of  the  Gothic 
fictions  and  the  institution  of  chivalry;  and  when  Percy 
ventured  to  hope  that  cultivated  readers  would  find  some- 
thing deserving  attention  in  old  English  minstrelsy.  It 
was  still  worth  considering  a  half-century  later,  when 
Coleridge  explained  away  the  dramatic  unities,  and 
Byron  once  more  took  up  the  lost  cause  of  Pope.  But 
by  1832  the  literary  revolution  was  complete.  Romance 
was  in  no  further  need  of  vindication,  when  all  Scott's 
library  of  prose  and  verse  stood  back  of  her,  and 

"  High-piled  books  in  charactery 
Held,  like  rich  garners,  the  full-ripened  grain." 


230  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

As  to  Scott's  best  invention,  the  historical  romance,  I 
shall  not  pursue  its  fortunes  to  the  end.     The  formula 
once  constituted,  its  application  was  easy,  whether  the 
period  chosen  was  the  Middle  Ages  or  any  old  period 
b.c.  or  a.d.     Here  and  there  an  individual  stands  forth 
from  the  class,  either  for  its  excellent  conformity  with 
the  Waverley  type  or  for  its  originality  in  deviation.     Of 
the  former  kind  is  Charles  Reade's  "  The  Cloister  and 
the   Hearth"    (1861);    and   of   the  latter  Mr.  Maurice 
Hewlett's  "The  Forest  Lovers"  (1898).     The  title  page 
of  Reade's  novel  describes  the  book  as  "  a  matter-of-fact 
romance."     It  is  as  well  documented  as  any  of  Scott's, 
and  reposes  especially  upon  the  "Colloquies"  of  ^Eras- 
mus, the  betrothal  of  whose  parents,  with  their  subse- 
quent separation  by  the  monastic  vow  of  celibacy,  is'the 
subject   of  the  story.     This  is  somewhat  romanticised, 
but   keeps   a  firm  grip  upon  historical    realities.     The 
period  of  the  action  is  the  fifteenth  century,  yet  the  work 
is  as  far  as  possible  from  being  a  chivalry  tale,  like  the 
diaphanous  fictions  of  Fouque'.     "In  that   rude   age," 
writes  the  novelist,  "  body  prevailing  over  mind,  all  sen- 
timents took  material  forms.     Man  repented  with  scourges, 
prayed  by  bead,  bribed  the  saints  with  wax  tapers,  put 
fish  into  the  body  to  sanctify  the  soul,  sojourned  in  cold 
water  for  empire  over  the  emotions,  and  thanked  God  for 
returning  health  in  1  cwt.,  2  stone,  7  lbs.,  3  oz.,  1  dwt. 
of  bread  and  cheese."     There  is  no  lack  in  "  The  Clois- 
ter and  the  Hearth  "  of  stirring  incident  and  bold  adven- 
ture;   encounters  with  bears  and  with    bandits,  sieges, 
witch  trials,  gallows  hung  with  thieves,  archery  with  long 
bow  and   arbalest — everywhere  fighting   enough,  as   in 
Scott;  and,  also  as  in  Scott,  behind  the  private  drama  of 


diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.   23 1 

true  love,  intrigue,  persecution,  the  broad  picture  of  so- 
ciety. It  is  no  idealised  version  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
The  ugly,  sordid  side  of  mediaeval  life  is  turned  outwards; 
its  dirt,  discomfort,  ignorance,  absurdity,  brutality,  un- 
reason and  insecurity  are  rendered  with  crass  realism. 
The  burgher  is  more  in  evidence  than  the  chevalier. 
Less  after  the  manner  of  the  Waverley  novels,  and  more 
after  that  of  "  Hypatia,"  "  Romola,"  and  "  Fathers  and 
Sons,"  it  depicts  the  intellectual  unrest  of  the  time,  the 
conflicting  ideals  of  the  old  and  new  generations.  The 
printing-press  is  being  set  up,  and  the  hero  finds  his  art 
of  calligraphy,  learned  in  the  scriptorium,  no  longer  in 
request.  The  Pope  and  many  of  the  higher  clergy  are 
infected  with  the  religious  scepticism  and  humanitarian 
enthusiasm  of  the  Renaissance.  The  child  Erasmus  is 
the  new  birth  of  reason,  destined  to  make  war  on  monkery 
and  superstition  and  thereby  avenge  his  parents'  wrongs. 
Of  quite  another  fashion  of  mediaevalism  is  Mr.  Hewlett's 
story — sheer  romance.  The  wonderful  wood  of  Mor- 
graunt,  with  its  charcoal  burners  and  wayside  shrines, 
black  meres  frowned  over  by  skeleton  castles,  and  gentle 
hinds  milked  by  the  heroine  to  get  food  for  her  wounded 
lover,  is  of  no  time  or  country,  but  almost  as  unreal  as 
Spenser's  fairy  forest.  Through  its  wild  ways  Isoult  la 
Desirous  and  Prosper  le  Gai  go  adventuring  like  Una 
and  her  Red  Cross  knight,  or  Enid  and  Geraint.  Or, 
again,  Isoult  in  her  page's  dress,  and  forsaken  by  her 
wedded  lord,  *is  like  Viola  or  Imogen  or  Rosalind,  or 
Constance  in  "  Marmion,"  or  any  lady  of  old  romance. 
Or  sometimes  again  she  is  like  a  wood  spirit,  or  an  ele- 
mental creature  such  as  was  Undine.  The  invented 
place  names,  High  March,  Wanmeeting,  Market  Basing, 


232  <iA  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

etc.,  with  their  transparent  air  of  actuality,  sound  an  echo 
from  William  Morris'  prose  romances,  like  "The  House 
of  the  Wolfings"  and  "The  Sundering  Flood."  As  in 
the  laSc  named,  and  in  Thomas  Hardy's  "  Return  of  the 
Native,"  the  reader's  imagination  is  assisted  by  a  map  of 
the  Morgraunt  forest  and  the  river  Wan.  Mr.  Hewlett 
has  evidently  profited,  too,  by  recent  romances  of  various 
schools :  by  "  Prince  Otto,"  e.g.,  and  "  The  Prisoner  of 
Zenda,"  and  possibly  by  others.  His  Middle  Ages  are 
not  the  Middle  Ages  of  history,  but  of  poetic  convention ; 
a  world  where  anything  may  happen  and  where  the  facts 
of  any  precise  social  state  are  attenuated  into  "  atmos- 
phere" for  the  use  of  the  imagination.  "The  Forest 
Lovers  "  is  nearer  to  "  Christabel  "  or  "  La  Belle  Dame 
sans  Merci  "  than  to  "  Ivanhoe  " :  is,  indeed,  a  prose  poem, 
though  not  quite  an  allegory  like  "  Sintram  and  his 
Companions." 
f  Among  Scott's  contemporaries,  Byron  and  Shelley, 
profoundly  romantic  in  temper,  were  not  retrospective  in 
their  habit  of  mind ;  and  the  Middle  Ages,  in  particular, 
had  little  to  say  to  them.  Scott  stood  for  the  past;  Byron 
— a  man  of  his  time,  a  modern  raan: — for  the  present; 
Shelley — a  visionary,  with  a  system  of  philosophical  per- 
fectionism— for  the  future.  Memory,  Mnemosyne,  mother 
of  the  muses,  was  the  nurse  of  Scott's  genius.  Byron 
lived  intensely  in  the  world  which  he  affected  to  despise. 
Shelley  prophesied,  with  eyes  fixed  upon  the  coming  age. 
We  have  found,  in  Byron's  contributions  to  the  Pope 
controversy,  one  expression  of  his  instinctive  sympathy 
with  the  classical  and  contempt  for  the  Gothic.  Shelley, 
too,  was  a  Hellenist;  and  to  both,  in  their  angry  break 
with  authority  and  their  worship  of  liberty,  the  naked 


diffused  ^Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    233 

freedom,  the  clear  light,  the  noble  and  harmonious  forms 
of  the  antique  were  as  attractive  as  the  twilight  of  the 
"ages  of  faith,"  with  their  mysticism,  asceticism,  and 
grotesque  superstitions,  were  repulsive.  Remote  as  their 
own  feverish  and  exuberant  poetry  was  from  the  unexcited 
manner  of  classical  work,  the  latter  was  the  ideal  towards 
which  they  more  and  more  inclined.  The  points  at  which 
these 'two  poets  touch  our  history,  then,  are  few.  Byron, 
to  be  sure,  cast  "  Childe  Harold  "  into  Spenserian  verse, 
and  gave  it  a  ballad  title.*  In  the  first  canto  there  are 
a  few  archaisms;  words  like  fere,  shent,  and  losel  occur, 
together  with  Gothic  properties,  such  as  the  "  eremite's 
sad  cell  "  and  "  Paynim  shores  "  and  Newstead's  "  mon- 
astic dome."  The  ballad  "Adieu,  adieu  my  native 
shore,"  was  suggested  by  "  Lord  Maxwell's  Good-Night " 
in  the  "  Border  Minstrelsy,"  and  introduces  some  roman- 
tic appurtenances:  the  harp,  the  falcon,  and  the  little 
foot-page.  But  this  kind  of  falsetto,  in  the  tradition  of 
the  last-century  Spenserians,  evidently  hampered  the 
poet;  so  he  shook  himself  free  from  imitation  after  the 
opening  stanzas,  and  spoke  in  his  natural  voice.t  "  Lara  " 
is  a  tale  of  feudal  days,  with  a  due  proportion  of  knights, 
dames,  vassals,  and  pages;  and  an  ancestral  hall  with 
gloomy  vaults  and  portrait  galleries,  where 

" — the  moonbeam  shone 
Through  the  dim  lattice  o'er  the  floor  of  stone, 

*"It  is  almost  superfluous  to  mention  that  the  appellation 
'Childe,'  as  'Childe  Waters,'  'Childe  Childers,'  etc.,  is  used 
as  more  consonant  with  the  old  structure  of  versification  which 
I  have  adopted." — Preface  to  "Childe  Harold."  Byron  ap- 
peals to  a  letter  of  Beattie  relating  to  "  The  Minstrel, "  to  jus- 
tify his  choice  of  the  stanza. 

\  See  vol.  i.,  p.  98. 


234  *A  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

And  the  high  fretted  roof  and  saints  that  there 
O'er  Gothic  windows  knelt  in  pictured  prayer.  .  .  . 
The  waving  banner  and  the  clapping  door, 
The  rustling  tapestry  and  the  echoing  floor ; 
The  long  dim  shadows  of  surrounding  trees, 
The  flapping  bats,  the  night-song  of  the  breeze, 
Aught  they  behold  or  hear  their  thought  appalls, 
As  evening  saddens  o'er  the  dark  grey  walls." 

But  these  things  are  unimportant  in  Byron — mere  com- 
monplaces of  description  inherited  from  Scott  and  Lewis 
and  Mrs.  Radcliffe.  Neither  is  it  of  importance  that 
"Parisina"  is  a  tale  of  the  year  1405,  and  has  an  echo 
in  it  of  convent  bells  and  the  death  chant  of  friars ;  nor 
that  the  first  scene  of  "  Manfred "  passes  in  a  "  Gothic 
gallery,"  and  includes  an  incantation  of  spirits  upon  the 
model  of  "  Faust " ;  nor  that  "  Marino  Faliero  "  and  "  The 
Two  Foscari "  are  founded  on  incidents  of  Venetian  his- 
tory which  happened  in  the  fourteenth  and  fifteenth  cen- 
turies respectively;  nor  yet  that  Byron  translated  the 
Spanish  ballad  "Woe  is  me  Alhama"  and  a  passage 
from  Pulci's  "Morgante  Maggiore."  *  Similarly  Shel- 
ley's experimental  versions  of  the  "  Prolog  im  Himmel," 
and  "  Walpurgisnacht "  in  "  Faust,"  and  of  scenes  from 
Calderon's  "  Magico  Prodigioso "  are  felt  to  be  without 
special  significance  in  comparison  with  the  body  of  his 
writings.  "  Faust "  impressed  him,  as  it  did  Byron,  and 
he  urged  Coleridge  to  translate  it,  speaking  of  the  current 
English  versions  as  wretched  misrepresentations  of  the 
original.  But  in  all  of  Shelley's  poetry  the  scenery, 
architecture,  and  imagery  in  general  are  sometimes  Ital- 
ian, sometimes  Asiatic,  often  wholly  fantastic,  but  never 
mediaeval.     Their  splendour  is  a  classic  splendour,  and 

*For  Byron's  and  Shelley's  dealings  with   Dante,    vide 
supra,  pp.  99-102. 


diffused  Itymanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    235 

not  what  Milton  contemptuously  calls  "  a  Hunnish  and 
Norwegian  stateliness."  His  favourite  names  are  Greek : 
Cythna,  Ianthe,  and  the  like.  The  ruined  cathedral  in 
"  Queen  Mab  " — a  poem  only  in  its  title  romantic — is 
coupled  with  the  ruined  dungeon,  in  whose  courts  the 
children  play;  both  alike  "works  of  faith  and  slavery," 
symbols  of  the  priestcraft  and  kingcraft  which  Shelley 
hated,  now  made  harmless  by  the  reign  of  Reason  and 
Love  in  a  regenerated  universe.  How  different  is  the 
feeling  which  the  empty  cathedral  inspires  in  Lowell; 
once  thronged  with  worshippers,  now  pathetically  lonely 
— a  cliff,  far  inland,  from  which  the  sea  of  faith  has  for- 
ever withdrawn !  At  the  time  when  "  Queen  Mab  "  was 
written,  Coleridge,  Southey,  and  Landor's  "  Gebir  "  were 
Shelley's  favourite  reading.  "He  was  a  lover  of  the 
wonderful  and  wild  in  literature,"  says  Mrs.  Shelley,  in 
her  notes  on  the  poem ;  "  but  had  not  fostered  these  tastes 
at  their  genuine  sources — the  romances  and  chivalry  of 
the  Middle  Ages — but  in  the  perusal  of  such  German 
works  as  were  current  in  those  days.*  .  .  .  Our  earlier 
English  poetry  was  almost  unknown  to  him." 

"Queen  Mab"  begins  with  a  close  imitation  of  they 
opening  lines  of  Southey's  "Thalaba  the  Destroyer."  \ 
The  third  member  of  the  Lake  School  is  a  standing  illus- 
tration of  Mr.  Colvin's  contention  that  the  "distinction 
between  classic  and  romantic  is  less  in  subject  than  in 
treatment.  Southey  regarded  himself  as,  equally  with 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  an  v  innovator  and  a  rebel 
against  poetic  conventions.  His  big  Oriental  epics, 
"  Thalaba  "  and  "  The  Curse  of  Kehama,"  are  written  in 

*For  the  type  of  prose  romance  essayed  by  Shelley,  see 
vol.  i.,  p.  403. 


236  cA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

verse  purposely  irregular,  but  so  inferior  in  effect  to  the 
irregular  verse  of  Coleridge  and  Scott  as  to  prove  that 
irregularity,  as  such,  is  only  tolerable  when  controlled  by 
the  subtly  varying  lyric  impulse — not  when  it  is  adopted 
as  a  literary  method.  Southey's  worth  as  a  man,  his  in- 
defatigable industry,  his  scholarship,  and  his  excellent 
work  in  prose  make  him  an  imposing  figure  in  our  litera- 
ture. But  his  poetical  reputation  has  faded  more  rapidly 
than  that  of  his  greater  contemporaries.  He  ranged 
widely  in  search  of  subjects  and  experimented  boldly  in 
forms  of  verse;  but  his  poems  are  seldom  inspired;  they 
are  manufactures  rather  than  creations,  and  to-day 
Southey,  the  poet,  represents  nothing  in  particular. 

But,  like  Taylor  of  Norwich,  Southey,  by  his  studies  in 
foreign  literature,  added  much  to  the  romantic  material 
constantly  accumulating  in  the  English  tongue.  In  his 
two  visits  to  the  Peninsula  he  made  acquaintance  with 
Spanish  and  Portuguese;  and  afterwards  by  his  transla- 
tions and  otherwise,  helped  his  countrymen  to  a  knowl- 
edge of  the  old  legendary  poetry  of  Spain,  the  country 
above  all  others  of  chivalry  and  romance.  Mention  has 
already  been  made  of  his  versions  of  "  Amadis  of  Gaul," 
"Palmerinof  England,"  and  the  "Chronicle of  the  Cid." 
The  last  named  was  not  a  translation  from  any  single 
source,  but  was  put  together  from  the  "  Poem  of  the  Cid," 
which  the  translator  considered  to  be  "  unquestionably 
the  oldest  poem  in  the  language"  and  probably  by  a 
writer  contemporary  with  the  great  Campeador  himself ; 
from  the  prose  "  Chronicle "  assigned  to  the  thirteenth 
century;  and  from  the  ballads,  which  Southey  thought 
mainly  worthless,  i.e.,  from  the  historical  point  of  view. 

Southey's  long  blank  verse  poems  on  mediaeval  sub- 


'  ^Diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.   237 

jects,  partly  historical,  partly  legendary,  "  Joan  of  Arc  " 
(1795),  "  Madoc  "  (1805),  an<*  "  Roderick,  the  Last  of  the 
Goths"  (1814),  like  his  friend  Landor's  "Gebir,"are 
examples  of  romantic  themes  with  classical  or,  at  least, 
unromantic  handling.  The  last  of  them  was  the  same  in 
subject,  indeed,  with  Landor's  drama,  "  Count  Julian." 
I  have  spoken  of  "  Thalaba "  and  "  The  Curse  of  Ke- 
hama  "  as  epics ;  but  Southey  rejected  "  the  degraded  title 
of  epic  "  and  scouted  the  rules  of  Aristotle.  Neverthe- 
less, the  best  qualities  of  these  blank  verse  narratives 
are  of  the  classic-epic  kind.  The  story  is  not  badly  told; 
the  measure  is  correct  if  not  distinguished ;  and  the  style 
is  simple,  clear,  and  in  pure  taste.  But  the  spell  of 
romance,  the  witchery  of  Coleridge  and  Keats  is  absent; 
and  so  are  the  glow  and  movement  of  Scott. 

Southey  got  up  his  history  and  local  colour  conscien- 
tiously, and  his  notes  present  a  formidable  array  of  au- 
thorities. While  engaged  upon  "Madoc,"  he  went  to 
Wales  to  verify  the  scenery  and  even  came  near  to  leas- 
ing a  cottage  and  taking  up  his  residence  there.  "  The 
manners  of  the  poem,"  he  asserted,  "  will  be  found  his- 
torically true."  The  hero  of  "  Madoc  "  was  a  legendary 
Welsh  prince  of  the  twelfth  century  who  led  a  colony  to 
America.  The  motif  of  the  poem  is  therefore  nearly  the 
same  as  in  William  Morris's  "  Earthly  Paradise,"  and  it 
is  curious  to  compare  the  two.  In  Southey's  hands  the 
blank  verse,  which  in  the  last  century  had  been  almost 
an  ear-mark  of  the  romanticising  schools,  is  far  more 
classical  than  the  heroic  couplet  which  Morris  writes. 
In  the  Welsh  portion  of  "  Madoc "  the  historical  back- 
ground is  carefully  studied  from  Giraldus  Cambrensis, 
Evans'   "Specimens,"   the    "Triads  of    Bardism,"   the 


238  cA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

"Cambrian  Biography,"  and  similar  sources;  and  in  the 
Aztec  portion,  from  old  Spanish  chronicles  of  the  con- 
quest of  Mexico  and  the  journals  of  modern  travellers 
in  America.     In    "The    Earthly    Paradise"   nothing   is 
r  historical  except  the  encounter  with  Edward  III.'s  fleet 
1     in  the  channel.     Over  all,  the  dreamlike  vagueness  and 
\    strangeness  of  romance.     Yet  the  imaginative  impression 
I   is  more  distinct ;  not  an  impression  of  reality,  but  as  of  a 
I  soft,  bright  miniature  painting  in  an  old  manuscript. 
In  common  with  his  literary  associates,  Southey  was 
prompted  by  Percy's  "  Reliques  "  to  try  his  hand  at  the 
legendary  ballad  and  at  longer  metrical  tales  like  "All 
for  Love  "  and  "  The  Pilgrim  to  Compostella."     Most  of 
these  pieces  date  from  the  last  years  of  the  century.     One 
of  them,  "  St.  Patrick's  Purgatory,"  was  inserted  by  Lewis 
in  his  "  Tales  of  Wonder."     Another  of  the  most  popu- 
lar,  and   a  capital   specimen  of    grotesque,   "  The  Old 
Woman  of  Berkeley,"  was  upon  a  theme  which  was  also 
undertaken  by  Taylor  of  Norwich  and  Dr.  Sayers  of  the 
same  city,  when  Southey  was  on  a  visit  to  the  former  in 
1798.     The  story,  told  by  Olaus  Magnus  as  well  as  by 
William  of  Malmesbury,  was  of  a  witch  whose  body  was 
carried  off  by  the  devil,  though  her  coffin  had  been  sprin- 
kled with  holy  water  and  bound  with  a  triple  chain.     For 
material  Southey  drew  upon  Spanish  chronicles,  French 
fabliaux,  the  "  Acta  Sanctorum,"  Matthew  of  Westminster, 
and  many  other  sources.     His  ballads  do  not  compare 
well  with  those  of  Scott  and  Coleridge.     They  abound 
in  the  supernatural — miracles  of  saints,  sorceries,  and 
4 apparitions;   but  the  matter-of-fact   narrative,  common- 
place diction,  and  jog-trot  verse  are  singularly  out  of 
keeping  with  the  subject  matter.     The  most  wildly  ro- 


^Diffused  %omanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    239 

mantic  situations  become  tamely  unromantic  under 
Southey's  handling.  Though  in  better  taste  than  Lewis' 
grisly  compositions,  yet,  as  in  Lewis,  the  want  of  "  high 
seriousness"  or  any  finer  imagination  in  these  legendary 
tales  makes  them  turn  constantly  towards  the  comic ;  so 
that  Southey  was  scandalised  to  learn  that  Mr.  Payne 
Collier  had  taken  his  "  Old  Woman  of  Berkeley  "  for  a 
"mock  ballad"  or  parody.  He  affected  especially  a 
stanza  which  he  credited  to  Lewis'  invention : 

M  Behind  a  wide  column,  half  breathless  with  fear 

She  crept  to  conceal  herself  there  ; 
That  instant  the  moon  o'er  a  dark  cloud  shone  clear,         \ 
And  she  saw  in  the  moonlight  two  ruffians  appear, 

And  between  them  a  corpse  did  they  bear. "  * 

Southey  employs  no  archaisms,  no  refrains,  nor  any  of 
the  stylistic  marks  of  ancient  minstrelsy.  His  ballads 
have  the  metrical  roughness  and  plain  speech  of  the  old 
popular  ballads,  but  none  of  their  frequent,  peculiar  beau- 
ties of  thought  and  phrase. 

Spain,  no  less  than  Germany  and  Italy,  was  laid  under 
contribution  by  the  English  romantics.  Southey's  work 
in  this  direction  was  followed  by  such  things  as  Lock- 
hart's  "Spanish  Ballads"  (1824),  Irving's  "Alhambra," 
and  Bryant's  and  Longfellow's  translations  from  Spanish 
lyrical  poetry.  But  these  exotics  did  not  stimulate  orig- 
inal creative  activity  in  England  in  equal  degree  with  the 
German  and  Italian  transplantings.  They  were  im- 
ported, not  appropriated.  Of  all  European  countries 
Spain  had  remained  the  most  Catholic  and  mediaeval. 
Her  eight  centuries  of  struggle  against  the  Moors  had 
given  her  a  rich  treasure  of  legendary  song  and  story. 

*"Mary,  the  Maid  of  the  Inn." 


240  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism 

She  had  a  body  of  popular  ballad  poetry  larger  than 
either  England's  or  Germany's.*  But  Spain  had  no 
modern  literature  to  mediate  between  the  old  and  new; 
nothing  at  all  corresponding  with  the  schools  of  romance 
in  Germany,  from  Herder  to  Schlegel,  which  effected  a 
revival  of  the  Teutonic  Middle  Age  and  impressed  it 
upon  contemporary  England  and  France.  Neither  could 
the  Spanish  Middle  Age  itself  show  any  such  supreme 
master  as  Dante,  whose  direct  influence  on  English  poetry 
has  waxed  with  the  century.  There  was  a  time  when,  for 
the  greater  part  of  a  century,  England  and  Spain  were  in 
rather  close  contact,  but  it  was  mainly  a  hostile  contact, 
and  its  tangential  points  were  the  ill-starred  marriage  of 
Philip  and  Mary,  the  Great  Armada  of  1588,  and  the 
abortive  "  Spanish  Marriage  "  negotiations  of  James  I.'s 
reign.  Readers  of  our  Elizabethan  literature,  however, 
cannot  fail  to  remark  a  knowledge  of,  and  interest  in, 
Spanish  affairs  now  quite  strange  to  English  writers. 
The  dialogue  of  the  old  drama  is  full  of  Spanish  phrases 
of  convenience  like  bezo  los  manos,paucas  palabras,  etc., 
which  were  evidently  quite  as  well  understood  by  the 
audience  as  was  later  the  colloquial  French — savoir 
/aire,  coup  de  grace,  etc. — which  began  to  come  in  with 
Dryden,  and  has  been  coming  ever  since.  The  comedy 
Spaniard,  like  Don  Armado  in  "  Love's  Labour's  Lost," 
was  a  familiar  figure  on  the  English  boards.  Middleton 
took  the  double  plot  of  his  "  Spanish  Gipsy  "  from  two 
novels  of  Cervantes;  and  his  "Game  of  Chess,"  a  politi- 
cal allegorical  play,  aimed  against  Spanish  intrigues, 
made  a  popular  hit  and  was  stopped,  after  a  then  unex- 

*Duran's  great  collection,  begun  in  1828,  embraces  nearly 
two  thousand  pieces. 


diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    241 

ampled  run,  in  consequence  of  the  remonstrances  of  Gon* 
domar,  the  Spanish  ambassador.  Somewhat  later  the 
Restoration  stage  borrowed  situations  from  the  Spanish 
love-intrigue  comedy,  not  so  much  directly  as  by  way  of 
Moliere,  Thomas  Corneille,  and  other  French  playwrights ; 
and  the  duenna  and  the  gracioso  became  stock  figures  in 
English  performances.  The  direct  influence  of  Calderon 
and  Lope  de  Vega  upon  our  native  theatre  was  infinites- 
imal. The  Spanish  national  drama,  like  the  English,  was 
self-developed  and  unaffected  by  classical  rules.  Like 
the  English,  it  was  romantic  in  spirit,  but  was  more 
religious  in  subject  and  more  lyrical  in  form.  The  land 
of  romance  produced  likewise  the  greatest  of  all  satires 
upon  romance.  "  Don  Quixote,"  of  course,  was  early 
translated  and  imitated  in  England ;  and  the  picaro  ro- 
mances had  an  important  influence  upon  the  evolution  of 
English  fiction  in  De  Foe  and  Smollett;  not  only  di- 
rectly through  books  like  "The  Spanish  Rogue,"  but  by 
way  of  Le  Sage.*  But  upon  the  whole,  the  relation  between 
English  and  Spanish  literature  had  been  one  of  distant 
respect  rather  than  of  intimacy.  There  was  never  any 
such  inrush  of  foreign  domination  from  this  quarter  as 
from  Italy  in  the  sixteenth  century,  or  from  France  in  the 
thirteenth,  fourteenth,  and  latter  half  of  the  seventeenth. 
The  unequalled  wealth  of  Spanish  literature  in  popular 
ballads  is  partially  explained  by  the  facility  with  which 
such  things  were  composed.  The  Spanish  ballad,  or 
romance,  was  a  stanza  (redondilla,  roundel)  of  four  eight- 

*  It  is  hardly  necessary  to  mention  early  English  transla- 
tions of  "  Palmerin  of  England  "  ( 1616)  and  "  Amadis  de  Gaul " 
(1580),  or  to  point  out  the  influence  of  Montemayor's  "Diana 
Enamorada  "  upon  Sidney,  Shakspere,  and  English  pastoral 
romance  in  general. 


242  ol  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

syllable  lines  with  a  prevailing  trachaic  movement — just 
the  metre,  in  short,  of  "  Locksley  Hall."  Only  the  sec- 
ond and  fourth  lines  rimed,  and  the  rime  was  merely 
assonant  or  vowel  rime.  Given  the  subject  and  the 
lyrical  impulse,  and  verses  of  this  sort  could  be  produced 
to  order  and  in  infinite  number  by  poets  of  the  humblest 
capacity.  The  subjects  were  furnished  mainly  by  Span- 
ish history  and  legend,  the  exploits  of  national  heroes 
like  the  Cid  (Ruy  Diaz  de  Bivar),  the  seven  Princes  of 
Lara,  Don  Fernan  Gonzalez,  and  Bernaldo  del  Carpio,  the 
leader  in  the  Spanish  versions  of  the  great  fight  by  Fon- 

tarabbia 

"When  Rowland  brave  and  Olivier, 
And  every  paladin  and  peer 
On  Roncesvalles  died." 

Southey  thought  the  Spanish  ballads  much  inferior  to 
the  English  and  Scotch,  a  judgment  to  which  students  of 
Spanish  poetry  will  perhaps  hardly  agree.*  The  Span- 
ish ballads,  like  the  British,  are  partly  historical  and 
legendary,  partly  entirely  romantic  or  fictitious.  They 
record  not  only  the  age-long  wars  against  the  Saracen, 

*"The  English  and  Scotch  ballads,  with  which  they  may 
most  naturally  be  compared,  belong  to  a  ruder  state  of  soci- 
ety, where  a  personal  violence  and  coarseness  prevailed 
which  did  not,  indeed,  prevent  the  poetry  it  produced  from 
being  full  of  energy,  and  sometimes  of  tenderness ;  but  which 
necessarily  had  less  dignity  and  elevation  than  belong  to  the 
character,  if  not  the  condition,  of  a  people  who,  like  the  Span- 
ish, were  for  centuries  engaged  in  a  contest  ennobled  by  a 
sense  of  religion  and  loyalty — a  contest  which  could  not  fail 
sometimes  to  raise  the  minds  and  thoughts  of  those  engaged 
in  it  far  above  such  an  atmosphere  as  settled  round  the  bloody 
feuds  of  rival  barons  or  the  gross  maraudings  of  a  border 
warfare.  The  truth  of  this  will  at  once  be  felt,  if  we  compare 
the  striking  series  of  ballads  on  Robin  Hood  with  those  on  the 
Cid  and  Bernardo  de  Carpio  ;  or  if  we  compare  the  deep  trag- 
edy of  Edom  O' Gordon  with  that  of  the  Conde  Alarcos  ;  or, 


diffused  Romanticism  in  the  [Nineteenth  Century.    243 

the  common  enemy,  but  the  internecine  feuds  of  the  Span- 
ish Christian  kingdoms,  the  quarrels  between  the  kings 
and  their  vassals,  and  many  a  dark  tale  of  domestic 
treachery  or  violence.  In  these  respects  their  resem- 
blance to  the  English  and  Scotch  border  ballads  is  obvi- 
ous ;  and  it  has  been  pointed  out  that  they  sprang  from 
similar  conditions,  a  frontier  war  for  national  independ- 
ence, maintained  for  centuries  against  a  stubborn  foe. 
The  traditions  concerning  Wallace  and  the  Bruce  have 
some  analogy  with  the  chronicles  of  the  Cid;  but  as  to 
(the  border  fights  celebrated  in  Scott's  "Minstrelsy,"  they 
were  between  peoples  of  the  same  race,  tongue,  and 
faith )  and  were  but  petty  squabbles  in  comparison  with 
that  epic  crusade  in  which  the  remnants  of  the  old  Gothic 
conquerors  slowly  made  head  against,  and  finally  over- 
threw and  expelled,  an  Oriental  religion,  a  foreign  blood, 
and  a  civilisation  in  many  respects  more  brilliant  than 
anything  which  Europe  could  show.  The  contrast  be- 
tween Castile  and  Granada  is  more  picturesque  than  the 
difference  between  Lothian  and  Northumberland.  The 
Spanish  ballads  have  the  advantage,  then,  of  being  con- 
nected with  imposing  passages  of  history.  In  spirit  they 
are  intensely  national.  Three  motives  animate  them  all : 
loyalty  to  the  king,  devotion  to  the  cross,  and  the  pun- 
donor  :  that  sensitive  personal  honour — the  "Castilian 
pride  "  of  "  Hemani," — which  sometimes  ran  into  fantas- 

what  would  be  better  than  either,  if  we  should  sit  down  to  the 
'  Romancero  General, '  with  its  poetical  confusion  of  Moorish 
splendours  and  Christian  loyalty,  just  when  we  have  come 
"fresh  from  Percy's '  Reliques  '  or  Scott's  '  Minstrelsy '  "  ("  His- 
tory of  Spanish  Literature,"  George  Ticknor,  vol.  i.,  p.  141. 
third  American  ed.,  1866).  The  "Romancero  General"  was 
the  great  collection  of  some  thousand  ballads  and  lyrics  pub- 
lished in  1602-14. 


244  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

tic  excess.  A  rude  chivalry  occasionally  softens  the  feroc- 
ity of  feudal  manners  in  Northern  ballad-poetry,  as  in  the 
speech  of  Percy  over  the  dead  Douglas  in  "  Chevy  Chase." 
But  in  the  Spanish  romances  the  knightly  feeling  is  all- 
pervading.  The  warriors  are  hidalgos,  gentlemen  of  a 
lofty  courtesy ;  the  Moorish  chieftains  are  not  "heathen 
hounds,"  but  chivalrous  adversaries,  to  be  treated,  in  de- 
feat, with  a  certain  generosity.  This  refinement  and 
magnanimity  are  akin  to  that  ideality  of  temper  which 
makes  Don  Quixote  at  once  so  noble  and  so  ridiculous, 
and  which  is  quite  remote  from  the  sincere  realism  of 
the  British  minstrelsy.  In  style  the  Spanish  ballads 
are  simple,  forcible,  and  direct,  but  somewhat  monot- 
onous in  their  facility.  The  English  and  Scotch  have 
a  wider  range  of  subject;  the  best  of  them  have  a  con- 
densed energy  of  expression  and  a  depth  of  tragic  feeling 
which  is  more  potent  than  the  melancholy  grace  of  the 
Spanish.  Women  take  a  more  active  part  in  the  former, 
the  Christians  of  the  Peninsula  having  caught  from  their 
Saracen  foes  a  prejudice  in  favour  of  womanly  seclusion 
and  retirement.  There  is  also  a  wilder  imagination  in 
Northern  balladry ;  a  much  larger  element  of  the  mytho- 
logical and  supernatural.  Ghosts,  demons,  fairies,  en- 
chanters are  rare  in  the  Spanish  poems.  Where  the 
marvellous  enters  into  them  at  all,  it  is  mostly  in  the 
shape  of  saintly  miracles.  St.  James  of  Compostella 
appears  on  horseback  among  the  Christian  hosts  battling 
with  the  Moors,  or  even  in  the  army  of  the  Conquista- 
dores  in  Mexico — an  incident  which  Macaulay  likens  to 
the  apparition  of  the  "  great  twin  BrethrrfJ'  in  the  Roman 
battle  of  Lake  Regillus.  The  mediaeval  Spaniards  were 
possibly  to  the  full  as  superstitious  as  their  Scottish  con- 


^Diffused  Romanticism  in  the  (Nineteenth  Century.    245 

temporaries,  but  their  superstitions  were  the  legends  of 
the  Catholic  Church,  not  the  inherited  folklore  of  Gothic 
and  Celtic  heathendom.  I  will  venture  to  suggest,  as 
one  reason  of  this  difference,  the  absence  of  forests  in 
Spain.  The  shadowy  recesses  of  northern  Europe  were 
the  natural  haunts  of  mystery  and  unearthly  terrors.  The 
old  Teutonic  forest,  the  Schwarzwald  and  the  Hartz,  were 
peopled  by  the  popular  imagination  with  were-wolves, 
spectre  huntsmen,  wood  spirits,  and  all  those  nameless 
creatures  which  Tieck  has  revived  in  his  "  Mahrchen  " 
and  Hauptmann  in  the  Rautendelein  of  his  "  Versunkene 
Glocke."  The  treeless  plateaus  of  Spain,  and  her  stony, 
denuded  sierras,  all  bare  and  bright  under  the  hot  south- 
ern sky,  offered  no  more  shelter  to  such  beings  of  the 
mind  than  they  did  to  the  genial  life  of  Robin  Hood  and 
his  merry  men  "all  under  the  greenwood  tree."  And 
this  mention  of  the  bold  archer  of  Sherwood  recalls  one 
other  difference — the  last  that  need  here  be  touched  upon 
— between  the  ballads  of  Spain  and  of  England.  Both 
constitute  a  body  of  popular  poetry,  /.<?.,  of  folk  poetry. 
They  recount  the  doings  of  the  upper  classes,  princes, 
nobles,  knights,  and  ladies,  as  seen  from  the  angle  of  ob- 
servation of  humble  minstrels  of  low  degree.  But  the 
people  count  for  much  more  in  the  English  poems.  The 
Spanish  are  more  aristocratic,  more  public,  less  domestic, 
and  many  of  them  composed,  it  is  thought,  by  lordly 
makers.  This  is  perhaps,  in  part,  a  difference  in  na- 
tional character;  and,  in  part,  a  difference  in  the  condi- 
tions under  which  the  social  institutions  of  the  two  coun- 
tries were  evolved. 

Spain  collected  her  ballads  early  in  numerous  song- 
books — cancioneros,  romancer os — the  first    of   which,  the 


246  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

" Cancionero "  of  15 10,  is  "the  oldest  collection  of 
popular  poetry,  properly  so-called,  that  is  to  be  found  in 
any  European  literature."  *  But  modern  Spain  had  gone 
through  her  classic  period,  like  England  and  Germany. 
She  had  submitted  to  the  critical  canons  of  Boileau,  and 
was  in  leading-strings  to  France  till  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  Spain,  too,  had  her  romantic  move- 
ment, and  incidentally  her  ballad  revival,  but  it  came 
later  than  in  England  and  Germany,  later  even  than  in 
France.  Historians  of  Spanish  literature  inform  us  that 
the  earliest  entry  of  French  romanticism  into  Spain  took 
place  in  Martinez  de  la  Rosa's  two  dramas,  "  The  Con- 
spiracy of  Venice"  (1834)  and  " Aben-Humeya,"  first 
written  in  French  and  played  at  Paris  in  1830;  and  that 
the  representation  of  Duke  de  Rivas'  play,  "  Don  Alvaro  " 
(1835),  was  "  an  event  in  the  history  of  the  modern  Span- 
ish drama  corresponding  to  the  production  of  *  Hernani ' 
at  the  Theatre  Francais  "  in  1830.!  Both  of  these  authors 
had  lived  in  France  and  had  there  made  acquaintance 
with  the  works  of  Chateaubriand,  Byron,  and  Walter 
Scott.  Spain  came  in  time  to  have  her  own  Byron  and 
her  own  Scott;  the  former  in  Jose*  de  Esprqnceda,  author 
of  "  The  Student  of  Salamanca,"  who  resided  for  a  time 
in  London ;  the  latter  in  Jose*  Zorrilla,  whose  "  Granada," 
"Legends  of  the  Cid,"  etc.,  "were  popular  for  the  same 
reason  that  \Marmion  '  and  *  The  Lady  of  the  Lake '  were 
popular;  for  their  revival  of  national  legends  in  a  form 
both  simple  and  picturesque  "  J    Scott  himself  is  reported 

*"The  Ancient  Ballads  of  Spain."  R.  Ford,  in  Edinburgh 
Review,  No.  146. 

f"A  History  of  Spanish  Literature."  By  James  Fitz- 
Maurice  Kelly,  New  York,  1898,  pp.  366-67. 

%Ibid.y  pp.  368-73. 


^Diffused  'Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    247 

to  have  said  that  if  he  had  come  across  in  his  younger 
days  Perez  de  Hita's  old  historical  romance,  "The  Civil 
Wars  of  Granada"  (1595),  "he  would  have  chosen  Spain 
as  the  scene  of  a  Waverley  novel."  *\ 

But  when  Lockhart,  in  1824,  set  himself  to 

4< — relate 
In  high-born  words  the  worth  of  many  a  knight 
From  tawny  Spain,  lost  in  the  world's  debate  " — 

her  ballad  poetry  had  fallen  into  disfavour  at  home,  and 
"  no  Spanish  Percy,  or  Ellis,  or  Ritson,"  he  complains, 
"has  arisen  to  perform  what  no  one  but  a  Spaniard  can 
entertain  the  smallest  hope  of  achieving."  f  Meanwhile, 
however,  the  German  romantic  school  had  laid  eager 
hands  upon  the  old  romantic  literature  of  Spain.  A. 
W.  Schlegel  (1803)  and  Gries  had  made  translations  from 
Calderon  in  assonant  verse ;  and  Friedrich  Schlegel — 
who  exalted  the  Spanish  dramatist  above  Shakspere, 
much  to  Heine's  disgust — had  written,  also  in  asonante, 
his  dramatic  poem  "Conde  Alarcos"  (1802),  founded  on 
the  well-known  ballad.  Brentano  and  others  of  the  ro- 
mantics went  so  far  as  to  practise  assonance  in  their  orig- 
inal as  well  as  translated  work.  Jacob  Grimm  (1815) 
and,  Depping  (1817)  edited  selections  from  the  "Ro- 
mancero  "  which  Lockhart  made  use  of  in  his  "  Ancient 
Spanish  Ballads."  With  equal  delight  the  French  ro- 
manticists— Hugo  and  Musset  in  particular — seized  upon 
the  treasures  of  the  "  Romancero  " ;  but  this  was  some- 
what later. 

Lockhart's  "  Spanish  Ballads,"  which  were  bold  and 

*  Kelly,  p.  270. 

f  The  collection  of  Sanchez  (1779)  is  described  as  an  imita- 
tion of  the  "  Reliques  "  (Edinburgh  Review,  No.  146). 


248  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

spirited  paraphrases  rather  than  close  versions  of  the 
originals,  enjoyed  a  great  success,  and  have  been  repeat- 
edly reprinted.  Ticknor  pronounced  them  undoubtedly 
a  work  of  genius,  as  much  so  as  any  book  of  the  sort  in 
any  literature  with  which  he  was  acquainted.*  In  the 
very  same  year  Sir  John  Bowring  published  his  "An- 
cient Poetry  and  Romance  of  Spain."  Hookham  Frere, 
that  most  accomplished  of  translators,  also  gave  speci- 
mens from  the  "  Romancero."  Of  late  years  versions  in 
increasing  numbers  of  Spanish  poetry  of  all  kinds,  an- 
cient and  modern,  by  Ormsby,  Gibson,  and  others  too 
numerous  to  name,  have  made  the  literature  of  the  coun- 
try largely  accessible  to  English  readers.  But  to  Lock- 
hart  belongs  the  credit  of  having  established  for  the 
English  public  the  convention  of  romantic  Spain — the 
Spain  of  lattice  and  guitar,  of  mantilla  and  Castanet,  arti- 
cles now  long  at  home  in  the  property  room  of  romance, 
along  with  the  gondola  of  Venice,  the  "  clock-face  "  trou- 
badour, and  the  castle  on  the  Rhine.  The  Spanish  brand 
of  mediaevalism  would  seem,  for  a  number  of  years,  to 
have  substituted  itself  in  England  for  the  German;  and 
doubtless  a  search  through  the  annuals  and  gift  books  and 
fashionable  fiction  and  minor  poetry  generally,  of  the 
years  from  1825  to  1840,  would  disclose  a  decided  Cas- 
tilian  colouring.  To  such  effect,  at  least,  is  the  testi- 
mony of  the  Edinburgh  reviewer — from  whom  I  have 
several  times  quoted — reviewing  in  January,  1841,  the 
new  and  sumptuously  illustrated  edition  of  "Ancient 
Spanish  Ballads."  "  Mr.  Lockhart's  success,"  he  writes, 
"  rendered  the  subject  fashionable ;  we  have,  however,  no 

*He  preferred,  however,  Sir  Edmund  Head's  rendering  of 
the  ballad  "Lady  Alda's  Dream "  to  Lockhart's  version. 


^Diffused  'Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    249 

space  to  bestow  on  the  minor  fry  who  dabbled  in  these 
.  .  .  fountains.  Those  who  remember  their  number  may 
possibly  deprecate  our  re-opening  the  floodgates  of  the 
happily  subsided  inundation." 

The  popular  ballad,  indeed,  is,  next  after  the  historical 
romance,  the  literary  form  to  which  the  romantic  move- 
ment has  given,  in  the  highest  degree,  a  renewal  of  pros- 
perous life.  Every  one  has  written  ballads,  and  the 
"  burden  "  has  become  a  burden  even  as  the  grasshopper 
is  such.  The  very  parodists  have  taken  the  matter  in 
hand.  The  only  Calverley  made  excellent  sport  of  the 
particular  variety  cultivated  by  Jean  Ingelow.  And  Sir 
Frederick  Pollock,  as  though  actuated  by  Lowell's  hint, 
about  "  a  declaration  of  love  under  the  forms  of  a  declara- 
tion in  trover,"  cast  the  law  reports  into  ballad  phrase  in 
his  "Leading  Cases  Done  into  English  "  (1876)  : 

"It  was  Thomas  Newman  and  five  his  feres 
(Three  more  would  have  made  them  nine) , 
And  they  entered  into  John  Vaux's  house, 
That  had  the  Queen's  Head  to  sign. 
The  birds  on  the  bough  sing  loud  and  sing  low, 
What  trespass  shall  be  ab  initio. " 

Of  course  the  great  majority  of  these  poems  in  the  bal- 
lad form,  whether  lyric  or  narrative,  or  a  mixture  of  both, 
are  in  no  sense  romantic.  They  are  like  Wordsworth's 
"Lyrical  Ballads,"  idyllic;  songs  of  the  affections,  of 
nature,  sentiment,  of  war,  the  sea,  the  hunting  field,  rus- 
tic life,  and  a  hundred  other  moods  and  topics.  Neither 
are  the  historical  or  legendary  ballads,  deriving  from 
Percy  and  reinforced  by  Scott,  prevailingly  romantic  in 
the  sense  of  being  mediaeval.  They  are  such  as  Macau- 
lay's  "  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome,"  in  which — with  ample 
acknowledgment  in  his  introduction  both  to  Scott  and 


250  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

to  the  "Reliques" — he  applies  the  form  of  the  English 
minstrel  ballad  to  an  imaginative  re-creation  of  the  lost 
popular  poetry  of  early  Rome.  Or  they  continue  Scott's 
Jacobite  tradition,  like  "  Aytoun's  Lays  of  the  Scottish 
Cavaliers,"  Browning's  "  Cavalier  Tunes,"  Thornbury's 
"Songs  of  the  Cavaliers  and  Roundheads"  (1857),  and 
a  few  of  Motherwell's  ditties.  These  last  named,  except 
Browning,  were  all  Scotchmen  and  staunch  Tories;  as 
were  likewise  Lockhart  and  Hogg;  and,  for  obvious  rea- 
sons, it  is  in  Scotland  that  the  simpler  fashion  of  ballad 
writing,  whether  in  dialect  or  standard  English,  and  more 
especially  as  employed  upon  martial  subjects,  has  flour- 
ished longest.  Artifice  and  ballad  preciosity  have  been 
cultivated  more  sedulously  in  the  south,  with  a  learned 
use  of  the  repetend,  archaism  of  style,  and  imitation  of 
the  quaint  mediaeval  habit  of  mind. 
(  Of  the  group  most  immediately  connected  with  Scott 
and  who  assisted  him,  more  or  less,  in  his  "  Minstrelsy  " 
collection,  may  be  mentioned  the  eccentric  John  Leyden, 
immensely  learned  in  Border  antiquities  and  poetry ;  and 
James  Hogg,  the  "  Ettrick  Shepherd."  The  latter  was  a 
peasant  bard,  an  actual  shepherd  and  afterward  a  sheep 
farmer,  a  self-taught  man  with  little  schooling,  who 
aspired  to  become  a  second  Burns,  and  composed  much  of 
his  poetry  while  lying  out  on  the  hills,  wrapped  in  his 
plaid  and  tending  his  flocks  like  any  Corydon  or  Thyrsis. 
He  was  a  singular  mixture  of  genius  and  vanity,  at  once 
the  admiration  and  the  butt  of  the  Blackwood's  wits,  who 
made  him  the  mouthpiece  of  humour  and  eloquence  which 
were  not  his,  but  Christopher  North's.  The  puzzled  shep- 
herd hardly  knew  how  to  take  it;  he  was  a  little  gratified 
and  a  good  deal  nettled.     But  the  flamboyant  figure  of  him 


'Diffused  Romanticism  in  the  [Nineteenth  Century,   251 

in  the  Nodes  will  probably  do  as  much  as  his  own  verses 
to  keep  his  memory  alive  with  posterity.  Nevertheless, 
Hogg  is  one  of  the  best  of  modern  Scotch  ballad  poets. 
Having  read  the  first  two  volumes  of  the  "  Border  Min- 
strelsy," he  was  dissatisfied  with  some  of  the  modern  bal- 
lad imitations  therein  and  sent  his  criticisms  to  Scott. 
They  were  sound  criticisms,  for  Hogg  had  an  intimate 
knowledge  of  popular  poetry  and  a  quick  perception  of 
what  was  genuine  and  what  was  spurious  in  such  compo- 
sitions. Sir  Walter  called  him  in  aid  of  his  third  vol- 
ume and  found  his  services  of  value. 

As  a  Border  minstrel,  Hogg  ranks  next  to  Scott — is, 
in  fact,  a  sort  of  inferior  Scott.  His  range  was  narrower, 
but  he  was  just  as  thoroughly  saturated  with  the  legend- 
ary lore  of  the  countryside,  and  in  some  respects  he  stood 
closer  to  the  spirit  of  that  peasant  life  in  which  popular 
poetry  has  its  source.  As  a  ballad  poet,  indeed,  he  is  f 
not  always  Scott's  inferior,  though  even  his  ballads  are 
apt  to  be  too  long  and  without  the  finish  and  the  instinct 
for  selection  which  marks  the  true  artist.  When  he  es- 
sayed metrical  romances  in  numerous  cantos,  his  defi- 
ciencies in  art  became  too  fatally  evident.  Scott,  in  his 
longer  poems,  is  often  profuse  and  unequal,  but  always 
on  a  much  higher  level  than  Hogg.  The  latter  had  no 
skill  in  conducting  to  the  end  a  fable  of  some  complex- 
ity, involving  a  number  of  varied  characters  and  a  really 
dramatic  action.  "  Mador  of  the  Moor,"  e.g.y  is  a  mani- 
fest and  not  very  successful  imitation  of  "  The  Lady  of 
the  Lake  " ;  and  it  requires  a  strong  appetite  for  the  ro- 
mantic to  sustain  a  reader  through  the  six  parts  of  "  Queen 
Hynde"  and  the  four  parts  of  "The  Pilgrims  of  the 
Sun."     By  general  consent,  the  best  of  Hogg's  more  am- 


252  cA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

bitious  poems  is  "  The  Queen's  Wake,"  and  the  best  thing 
in  it  is  "  Kilmeny."  "  The  Queen's  Wake  "  (1813)  com- 
bines, in  its  narrative  plan,  the  framework  of  "  The  Lay 
of  the  Last  Minstrel "  with  the  song  competition  in  its 
sixth  canto.  Mary  Stuart,  on  landing  in  Scotland,  holds 
a  Christmas  wake  at  Holyrood,  where  seventeen  bards 
contend  before  her  for  the  prize  of  song.  The  lays  are 
in  many  different  moods  and  measures,  but  all  enclosed 
in  a  setting  of  octosyllabic  couplets,  closely  modelled 
upon  Scott;  and  the  whole  ends  with  a  tribute  to  the 
great  minstrel  who  had  waked  once  more  the  long  silent 
Harp  of  the  North.  The  thirteenth  bard's  song—"  Kil- 
meny"— is  of  the  type  of  traditionary  tale  familiar  in 
"Tam  Lin"  and  "Thomas  of  Ercildoune,"  and  tells  how 
a  maiden  was  spirited  away  to  fairyland,  where  she  saw 
a  prophetic  vision  of  her  country's  future  (including  the 
Napoleonic  wars)  and  returned  after  a  seven  years'  ab- 
sence. 

"Late,  late  in  a  gloamin'  when  all  was  still, 
When  the  fringe  was  red  on  the  westlin  hill, 
The  wood  was  sere,  the  moon  i'  the  wane, 
The  reek  o'  the  cot  hung  o'er  the  plain. 
Like  a  little  wee  cloud  in  the  world  its  lane ; 
When  the  ingle  lowed  wi'  an  eiry  leme, 
Late,  late  in  the  gloamin'  Kilmeny  came  hame." 

The  Ettrick  Shepherd's  peculiar  province  was  not  so 
much  the  romance  of  national  history  as  the  field  of  Scot- 
tish fairy  lore  and  popular  superstition.  It  was  he,  rather 
than  Walter  Scott,  who  carried  out  the  suggestions  long 
since  made  to  his  countryman,  John  Home,  in  Collins' 
"Ode  on  the  Superstitions  of  the  Highlands."  His 
poems  are  full  of  bogles,  kelpies,  brownies,  warlocks,  and 
all  manner  of  "  grammarie."     "  The  Witch  of  Fife  "  in 


diffused  'Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    253 

"  The  Queen's  Wake,"  a  spirited  bit  of  grotesque,  is  re- 
peatedly quoted  as  authority  upon  the  ways  of  Scotch 
witches  in  the  notes  to  Croker's  "Fairy  Legends  and 
Traditions  of  the  South  of  Ireland."  Similar  themes 
engaged  the  poet  in  his  prose  tales.  Some  of  these  were 
mere  modern  ghost  stories,  or  stories  of  murder,  robbery, 
death  warnings,  etc.  Others,  like  "The  Heart  of  Eil- 
don,"  dealt  with  ancient  legends  of  the  supernatural. 
Still  others,  like  "  The  Brownie  of  Bodsbeck :  a  Tale  of 
the  Covenanters,"  were  historical  novels  of  the  Stuart 
times.  Here  Hogg  was  on  Scott's  own  ground  and  did 
not  shine  by  comparison.  He  complained,  indeed,  that 
in  the  last-mentioned  tale,  he  had  been  accused  of  copy- 
ing "  Old  Mortality  " ;  but  asserted  that  he  had  written 
his  book  the  first  and  had  been  compelled  by  the  appear- 
ance of  Sir  Walter's,  to  go  over  his  own  manuscript  and 
substitute  another  name  for  Balfour  of  Burley,  his  origi- 
nal hero.  Nanny's  songs,  in  "The  Brownie  of  Bods- 
beck," are  among  Hogg's  best  ballads.  Others  are  scat- 
tered through  his  various  collections — "  The  Mountain 
Bard,"  "The  Forest  Minstrel,"  "Poetical  Tales  and  Bal- 
lads," etc. 

Another  Scotch  balladist  was  William^Motherwell 
one  of  the  most  competent  of  ballad  scholars  and  editors 
whose  "Minstrelsy:  Ancient  and  Modern,"  was  issued 
at  Glasgow  in  1827,  an(*  led  to  a  correspondence  between 
the  collector  and  Sir  Walter  Scott.*  In  1836  Mother- 
well was  associated  with  Hogg  in  editing  Burns'  works. 
His  original  ballads  are  few  in  number,  and  their  faults 
and  merits  are  of  quite  an  opposite  nature  from  his  col- 
laborator's. The  shepherd  was  a  man  of  the  people,  and 
*  Scott  and  Motherwell  never  met  in  person. 


;f 


254  tA  History  of  English  cHpmanticism. 

lived,  so  far  as  any  modern  can,  among  the  very  condi- 
tions which  produced  the  minstrel  songs.  He  inherited 
the  popular  beliefs.  His  great-grandmother  on  one  side 
was  a  notorious  witch;  his  grandfather  on  the  other  side 
had  "spoken  with  the  fairies."  His  poetry,  such  as  it 
is,  is  fluent  and  spontaneous.  Motherwell's,  on  the  con- 
trary, is  the  work  of  a  ballad  fancier,  a  student  learned 
in  lyric,  reproducing  old  modes  with  conscientious  art. 
His  balladry  is  more  condensed  and  skilful  than  Hogg's, 
but  seems  to  come  hard  to  him.  It  is  literary  poetry 
trying  to  be  Volkspoesie,  and  not  quite  succeeding.  Many 
of  the  pieces  in  the  southern  English,  such  as  "  Halbert 
the  Grim,"  "The  Troubadour's  Lament,"  "The  Crusad- 
er's Farewell,"  "The  Warthman's  Wail,"  "The  Demon 
Lady,"  "The  Witches'  Joys,"  and  "Lady  Margaret," 
have  an  echo  of  Elizabethan  music,  or  the  songs  of  Love- 
lace, or,  now  and  then,  the  verse  of  Coleridge  or  Byron. 
"  True  Love's  Dirge,"  e.g.,  borrows  a  burden  from  Shak- 
spere— "Heigho!  the  Wind  and  Rain."  Others,  like 
"Lord  Archibald:  A  Ballad,"  and  "Elfinland  Wud:  An 
Imitation  of  the  Ancient  Scottish  Romantic  Ballad,"  are 
in  archaic  Scotch  dialect  with  careful  ballad  phrasing. 
Hogg  employs  the  broad  Scotch,  but  it  is  mostly  the  ver- 
nacular of  his  own  time.  A  short  passage  from  "  The 
Witch  of  Fife  "  and  one  from  "  Elfin  Wud  "  will  illustrate 
two  very  different  types  of  ballad  manner: 

"  He  set  ane  reid-pipe  till  his  muthe 
And  he  playit  se  bonnileye, 
Till  the  gray  curlew  and  the  black-cock  flew 
To  listen  his  melodye. 

"It  rang  se  sweit  through  the  grim  Lommond, 
That  the  nycht-winde  lowner  blew  : 


^Diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.   255 

And  it  soupit  alang  the  Loch  Leven, 
And  wakenit  the  white  sea-mew. 

"It  rang  se  sweit  through  the  grim  Lommond, 
Se  sweitly  but  and  se  shill, 
That  the  wezilis  laup  out  of  their  mouldy  holis, 
And  dancit  on  the  mydnycht  hill. " 

"Around  her  slepis  the  quhyte  muneschyne, 
(Meik  is  mayden  undir  kell) , 
Hir  lips  bin  lyke  the  blude  reid  wyne  ; 
(The  rois  of  fiouris  hes  sweitest  smell) . 

"It  was  al  bricht  quhare  that  ladie  stude, 

(Far  my  luve  fure  ower  the  sea) . 

Bot  dern  is  the  lave  of  Elfinland  wud, 

(The  Knicht  pruvit  false  that  ance  luvit  me) . 

"The  ladie's  handis  were  quhyte  als  milk, 
(Ringis  my  luve  wore  mair  nor  ane) . 
Hir  skin  was  safter  nor  the  silk  ; 

(Lilly  bricht  schinis  my  hive's  halse  bane)." 

Upon  the  whole,  the  most  noteworthy  of  Motherwell's 
original  additions  to  the  stores  of  romantic  verse  were 
his  poems  on  subjects  from  Norse  legend  and  mythology, 
and  particularly  the  three  spirited  pieces  that  stand  first 
in  his  collection  (1832)— "The  Battle-Flag  of  Sigurd," 
"  The  Wooing  Song  of  Jarl  Egill  Skallagrim,"  and  "  The 
Sword  Chant  of  Thorstein  Randi."  These  stand  midway 
between  Gray's  "  Descent  of  Odin  "  and  the  later  work 
of  Longfellow,  William  Morris  and  others.  Since  Gray, 
little  or  nothing  of  the  kind  had  been  attempted ;  and 
Motherwell  gave  perhaps  the  first  expression  in  English 
song  of  the  Berserkir  rage  and  the  Viking  passion  for 
battle  and  sea  roving. 

During  the  nineteenth  century  English  romance  re- 
ceived new  increments  of  heroic  legend  and  fairy  lore 
from  the  Gaelic  of  Ireland.  It  was  not  until  1867  that 
Matthew  Arnold,  in  his  essay  "  On  the  Study  of  Celtic 


256  zA  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

Literature,"  pleading  for  a  chair  of  Celtic  at  Oxford,  be- 
spoke the  attention  of  the  English  public  to  those  ele- 
ments in  the  national  literature  which  corfle  from  the 
Celtic  strain  in  its  blood.  Arnold  knew  very  little  Cel- 
tic, and  his  essay  abounds  in  those  airy  generalisations 
which  are  so  irritating  to  more  plodding  critics.  His 
theory,  e.g.,  that  English  poetry  owes  its  sense  for  colour 
to  the  Celts,  when  taken  up  and  stated  nakedly  by  fol- 
lowing writers,  seems  too  absolute  in  its  ascription  of 
colour-blindness  to  the  Teutonic  races.  Still,  Arnold 
probably  defined  fairly  enough  the  distinctive  traits  of 
the  Celtic  genius.  He  attributes  to  a  Celtic  source  much 
of  the  turn  of  English  poetry  for  style,  much  of  its  turn 
for  melancholy,  and  nearly  all  its  turn  for  "natural 
magic."  "  The  forest  solitude,  the  bubbling  spring,  the 
wild  flowers,  are  everywhere  in  romance.  They  have  a 
mysterious  life  and  grace  there;  they  are  Nature's  own 
children,  and  utter  her  secret  in  a  way  which  makes  them 
something  quite  different  from  the  woods,  waters,  and 
plants  of  Greek  and  Latin  poetry.  Now,  of  this  delicate 
magic,  Celtic  romance  is  so  pre-eminent  a  mistress  that 
it  seems  impossible  to  believe  the  power  did  not  come 
into  romance  from  the  Celts." 

In  1825  T.  CroftonJ3!roker  published  the  first  volume 
of  his  delightful  "  Fairy  Legends  and  Traditions  of  the 
South  of  Ireland."  It  was  immediately  translated  into 
German  by  the  Grimm  brothers,  and  was  received  with 
enthusiasm  by  Walter  Scott,  who  was  introduced  to  the 
author  in  London  in  1826,  and  a  complimentary  letter 
from  whom  was  printed  in  the  preface  to  the  second 
edition. 

Croker's  book  opened  a  new  world  of  romance,  and 


^Diffused  ^Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.   257 

introduced  the  English  reader  to  novel  varieties  of  elf 
creatures,  with  outlandish  Gaelic  names;  the  Shefro;  the 
Boggart;  the*Phooka,  or  horse-fiend;  the  Banshee,  a  fa- 
miliar spirit  which  moans  outside  the  door  when  a  death 
impends;  the  Cluricaune,*  or  cellar  goblin;  the  Fir 
Darrig  (Red  Man) ;  the  Dullahan,  or  Headless  Horse- 
man. There  are  stories  of  changelings,  haunted  castles, 
buried  treasure,  the  "  death  coach,"  the  fairy  piper,  en- 
chanted lakes  which  cover  sunken  cities,  and  similar 
matters  not  unfamiliar  in  the  folk-lore  of  other  lands,  but 
all  with  an  odd  twist  to  them  and  set  against  a  back- 
ground of  the  manners  and  customs  of  modern  Irish 
peasantry.  The  Celtic  melancholy  is  not  much  in  evi- 
dence in  this  collection.  The  wild  Celtic  fancy  is  pres- 
ent, but  in  combination  with  Irish  gaiety  and  light- 
heartedness.  It  was  the  day  of  the  comedy  Irishman — 
Lover's  and  Lever's  Irishman — Handy  Andy,  Rory 
O'More,  Widow  Machree  and  the  like.  It  took  the  fam- 
ine of  '49  and  the  strenuous  work  of  the  Young  Ireland 
Party  which  gathered  about  the  Nation  in  1848,  to  dis- 
place this  traditional  figure  in  favour  of  a  more  earnest 
and  tragical  national  type.  But  a  single  quotation  will 
illustrate  the  natural  magic  of  which  Arnold  speaks: 
"The  Merrow  (mermaid)  put  the  comb  in  her  pocket, 
and  then  bent  down  her  head  and  whispered  some  words 
to  the  water  that  was  close  to  the  foot  of  the  rock.     Dick 

*  Mr.  Churton  Collins  thinks  that  the  lines  in  "  Guinevere  " — 

"  Down  in  the  cellars  merry  bloated  things 
Shouldered  the  spigot,  straddling  on  the  butts 
While  the  wine  ran  " — 

was  suggested  by  Croker's  description  of  the  Cluricaune. 
("Illustrations  of  Tennyson"  (1891),  p.  152.) 


258  *A  History  of  English  l^pmanticism. 

saw  the  murmur  of  the  words  upon  the  top  of  the  sea, 
going  out  towards  the  wide  ocean,  just  like  a  breath  of 
wind  rippling  along,  and,  says  he,  in  the  greatest  won- 
der, •  Is  it  speaking  you  are,  my  darling,  to  the  salt 
water  ? ' 

"  *  It's  nothing  else/  says  she,  quite  carelessly ;  *  I'm 
just  sending  word  home  to  my  father  not  to  be  waiting 
breakfast  for  me.' "  Except  for  its  lack  of  "  high  seri- 
ousness," this  is  the  imagination  that  makes  myths. 

Catholic  Ireland  still  cherishes  popular  beliefs  which 
in  England,  and  even  in  Scotland,  have  long  been  merely 
antiquarian  curiosities.  In  her  poetry  the  fairies  are 
never  very  far  away. 

"  Up  the  airy  mountain, 
Down  the  rushy  glen 
We  daren't  go  a-hunting 
For  fear  of  little  men. "  * 

Irish  critics,  to  be  sure,  tell  us  that  Allingham's  fairies 
are  English  fairies,  and  that  he  had  no  Gaelic,  though  he 
knew  and  loved  his  Irish  countryside.  He  was  a  Prot- 
estant and  a  loyalist,  and  lived  in  close  association  with 
the  English  Pre-Raphaelites — with  Rossetti  especially, 
who  made  the  illustration  for  "The  Maids  of  Elfin- 
Mere"  in  Allingham's  volume  "The  Music  Master" 
(1855).  The  Irish  fairies,  it  is  said,  are  beings  of  a 
darker  and  more  malignant  breed  than  Shakspere's 
elves.  Yet  in  Allingham's  poem  they  stole  little  Brid- 
get and  kept  her  seven  years,  till  she  died  of  sorrow  and 
lies  asleep  on  the  lake  bottom:  even  as  in  Ferguson's 
weird  ballad,  "  The  Fairy  Thorn,"  the  good  people  carry 
off  fair  Anna  Grace  from  the  midst  of  her  three  compan- 
*  "  The  Fairies. "     William  Allingham. 


diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    259 

ions,  who  "  pined  away  and  died  within  the  year  and 
day." 

"  To  the  latter  half  of  the  century  belongs  the  so-called 
Celtic  revival,  which  connects  itself  with  the  Nationalist 
movement  in  politics  and  is  partly  literary  and  partly  pa- 
triotic. It  may  be  doubted  whether,  for  practical  pur- 
poses, the  Gaelic  will  ever  come  again  into  general  use. 
But  the  concerted  endeavour  by  a  whole  nation  to  win 
back  its  ancient,  wellnigh  forgotten  speech  is  a  most  in- 
teresting social  phenomenon.  At  all  events,  both  by 
direct  translations  of  the  Gaelic  hero  epics  and  by  origi- 
nal work  in  which  the  Gaelic  spirit  is  transfused  through 
English  ballad  and  other  verse  forms,  a  lost  kingdom  of 
romance  has  been  recovered  and  a  bright  green  thread 
of  Celtic  poetry  runs  through  the  British  anthology  of  the 
century.  The  names  of  the  pioneers  and  leading  contrib- 
utors to  this  movement  are  significant  of  the  varied  strains 
of  blood  which  compose  Irish  nationality.  James  Clar- 
ence Mangan  was  a  Celt  of  the  Celts ;  Joseph  Sheridan 
Le  Fanu  and  Aubrey  de  Vere  were  of  Norman-Irish 
stock,  and  the  former  was  the  son  of  a  dean  of  the  Es- 
tablished Church,  and  himself  the  editor  of  a  Tory  news- 
paper; Sir  Samuel  Ferguson  was  an  Ulster  Protestant  of 
Scotch  descent;  Dr.  George  Sigerson  is  of  Norse  blood; 
Whitley  Stokes,  the  eminent  Celtic  scholar,  and  Dr.  John 
Todhunter,  author  of  "Three  Bardic  Tales"  (1896),  bear 
Anglo-Saxon  surnames;  the  latter  is  the  son  of  Quaker 
parents  and  was  educated  at  English  Quaker  schools. 

Mangan's  paraphrases  from  the  Gaelic,  "Poets  and 
Poetry  of  M  mister,"  appeared  posthumously  in  1850. 
They  include  a  number  of  lyrics,  wildly  and  mournfully 
beautiful,   inspired  "by  the  sorrows  of  Ireland:  "Dark 


260  *A  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

Rosaleen,"  "  Lament  for  the  Princes  of  Tir-Owen  and 
Tir-Connell,"  "O'Hussey's  Ode  to  the  Maguire,"  etc. 
The  ballad  form  was  not  practised  by  the  ancient  Gaelic 
epic  poets.  In  choosing  it  as  the  vehicle  for  their  ren- 
derings from  vernacular  narrative  poetry,  the  modern 
Irish  poets  have  departed  widely  from  the  English  and 
Scottish  model,  employing  a  variety  of  metres  and  not 
seeking  to  conform  their  diction  to  the  manner  of  the 
ballads  in  the  "  Reliques  "  or  the  "  Border  Minstrelsy." 
Ferguson's  "Lays  of  the  Western  Gael"  (1865)  is  a 
series  of  historical  ballads,  original  in  effect,  though 
based  upon  old  Gaelic  chronicles.  "Congal"  (1872)  is 
an  epic,  founded  on  an  ancient  bardic  tale,  and  written 
in  Chapman's  "fourteener"  and  reminding  the  reader 
frequently  of  Chapman's  large,  vigorous  manner,  his 
compound  epithets  and  spacious  Homeric  similes.  The 
same  epic  breadth  of  manner  was  applied  to  the  treat- 
ment of  other  hero  legends,  "  Conary,"  "  Deirdre,"  etc., 
in  a  subsequent  volume  (1880).  "Deirdre,"  the  finest 
of  all  the  old  Irish  stories,  was  also  handled  independ- 
ently by  the  late  Dr.  R.  D.  Joyce  in  the  verse  and  man- 
ner of  William  Morris'  "  Earthly  Paradise."  *  Among 
other  recent  workers  in  this  field  are  Aubrey  de  Vere,  a 
volume  of  selections  from  whose  poetry  appeared  at  New 
York  in  1894,  edited  by  Prof.  G.  E.  Woodberry:  George 
Sigerson,  whose  "  Bards  of  the  Gael  and  the  Gall,"  a 

*  See  vol.  i.,  p.  314.  Dr.  Joyce  was  for  some  years  a  resi- 
dent of  Boston,  where  his  "Ballads  of  Irish  Chivalry"  were 
published  in  1872.  His  "  Deirdre  "  received  high  praise  from 
J.  R.  Lowell.  Tennyson's  "Voyage  of  Maeldune "  (1880) 
probably  had  its  source  in  Dr.  P.  W.  Joyce's  "Old  Celtic 
Romances"  (1879)  (Collins'  "Illustrations  of  Tennyson,"  p. 
163).  Swinburne  pronounced  Ferguson's  "  Welshmen  of  Ti- 
rawley  "  one  of  the  best  of  modern  ballads. 


Ttiffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century,   261 

volume  of  translations  from  the  Irish  in  the  original  me- 
tres, was  issued  in  1897;  Whitley  Stokes,  an  accom- 
plished translator,  and  the  joint  editor  (with  Windisch) 
of  the  "  Irische  Texte  " ;  John  Todhunter,  author  of  "  The 
Banshee  and  Other  Poems"  (1888)  and  "Three  Bardic 
Tales"  (1896);  Alfred  Perceval  Graves,  author  of  "Irish 
Folk  Songs"  (1897),  and  many  other  volumes  of  national 
lyrics;  and  William  Larminie — "West  Irish  Folk  Tales 
and  Romances"  (1893),  etc. 

The  Celtism  of  this  Gaelic  renascence  is  of  a  much 
purer  and  more  genuine  character  than  the  Celtism  of 
Macpherson's  "  Ossian."  Yet  with  all  its  superiority  in 
artistic  results,  it  is  improbable  that  it  will  make  any 
such  impression  on  Europe  or  England  as  Macpherson 
made.  "  Ossian  "  was  the  first  revelation  to  the  world 
of  the  Celtic  spirit:  sophisticated,  rhetorical,  yet  still  the 
first;  and  it  is  not  likely  that  its  success  will  be  repeated. 
In  the  very  latest  school  of  Irish  verse,  represented  by 
such  names  as  Lionel  Johnson,^  B.  Yeats,  George  W. 
Russell,  Nora  Hopper,  the  mystical  spirit  which  inhab- 
its the  "  Celtic  twilight "  turns  into  modern  symbolism, 
so  that  some  of  their  poems  on  legendary  subjects  bear 
a  curious  resemblance  to  the  contemporary  work  of  Mae- 
terlinck: to  such  things  as  "Aglivaine  et  Salysette"  or 
"  Les  Sept  Princesses."  * 

The  narrative  ballad  is  hardly  one  of  the  forms  of  high 

*  For  a  survey  of  this  department  of  romantic  literature  the 
reader  is  referred  to  "A  Treasury  of  Irish  Poetry  in  the  Eng- 
lish Tongue."  Edited  by  Stopford  A.  Brooke  and  T.  W.  Rol- 
leston  (New  York,  1900).  There  are  a  quite  astonishing 
beauty  and  force  in  many  of  the  pieces  in  this  collection, 
though  some  of  the  editors'  claims  seem  excessive;  as,  e.g., 
that  Mr.  Yeats  is  "the  first  of  living  writers  in  the  English 
language. " 


262  nA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

art,  like  the  epic,  the  tragedy,  the  Pindaric  ode.  It  is 
simple  and  not  complex  like  the  sonnet:  not  of  the  aris- 
tocracy of  verse,  but  popular — not  to  say  plebeian — in  its 
associations.  It  is  easy  to  write  and,  in  its  commonest 
metrical  shape  of  eights  and  sixes,  apt  to  run  into  sing- 
song. Its  limitations,  even  in  the  hands  of  an  artist  like 
Coleridge  or  Rossetti,  are  obvious.  It  belongs  to  "  mi- 
nor poetry."  The  ballad  revival  has  not  been  an  unmixed 
blessing  and  is  responsible  for  much  slip-shod  work.  If 
Dr.  Johnson  could  come  back  from  the  shades  and  look 
over  our  recent  verse,  one  of  his  first  comments  would 
probably  be:  "Sir,  you  have  too  many  ballads."  Be  it 
understood  that  the  romantic  ballad  only  is  here  in  ques- 
tion, in  which  the  poet  of  a  literary  age  seeks  to  catch 
and  reproduce  the  tone  of  a  childlike,  unself-conscious 
time,  so  that  his  art  has  almost  inevitably  something  ar- 
tificial or  imitative.  Here  and  there  one  stands  out  from 
the  mass  by  its  skill  or  luck  in  overcoming  the  difficulty. 
There  is  Hawker's  "  Song  of  the  Western  Men,"  which 
Macaulay  and  others  quoted  as  historical,  though  only 
the  refrain  was  old : 

"And  shall  Trelawney  die? 
Here's  twenty  thousand  Cornish  men 
Will  know  the  reason  why  !  "  * 

There  is  Sydney  Dobell's  "  Keith  of  Ravelston,"  f  which 

*  Robert  Stephen  Hawker  was  vicar  of  Morwenstow,  near 
"wild  Tintagil  by  the  Cornish  Sea,"  where  Tennyson  visited 
him  in  1848.  Hawker  himself  made  contributions  to  Arthu- 
rian poetry,  "  Queen  Gwynnevar'  s  Round  "  and  "  The  Quest  of 
the  Sangreal  "  (1864) .  He  was  converted  to  the  Roman  Cath- 
olic faith  on  his  death-bed. 

\  Given  in  Palgrave's  "Golden  Treasury, "  second  series. 
Rossetti  wrote  of  Dobell's  ballad  in  1868:  "I  have  always 
regarded  that  poem  as  being  one  of  the  finest,  of  its  length,  in 
any  modern  poet ;  ranking  with  Keats'  '  La  Belle  Dame  sans 


^Diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.   263 

haunts  the  memory  with  the  insistent  iteration  of  its  re- 
frain : — 

"The  murmur  of  the  mourning  ghost 
That  keeps  the  shadowy  kine  ; 
Oh,  Keith  of  Ravelston, 
The  sorrows  of  thy  line  !  " 

And  again  there  is  Robert  Buchanan's  "  Ballad  of  Judas 
Iscariot"  which  Mr.  Stedman  compares  for  "weird  im- 
pressiveness  and  power "  with  "  The  Ancient  Mariner." 
The  mediaeval  feeling  is  most  successfully  captured  in 
this  poem.  It  recalls  the  old  "  Debate  between  the  Body 
and  Soul,"  and  still  more  the  touches  of  divine  compas- 
sion which  soften  the  rigours  of  Catholic  theology  in  the 
legends  of  the  saints.  It  strikes  the  keynote,  too,  of  that 
most  modern  ballad  mode  which  employs  the  narrative 
only  to  emphasize  some  thought  of  universal  application. 
There  is  salvation  for  all,  is  the  thought,  even  for  the 
blackest  soul  of  the  world,  the  soul  that  betrayed  its 
Maker.*  Such,  though  after  a  fashion  more  subtly  intel- 
lectual, is  the  doctrinal  use  to  which  this  popular  form  is 
put  by  one  of  the  latest  English  ballad  makers,  Mr.  John 
Davidson.  Read,  e.g.t  his  "  Ballad  of  a  Nun,"  f  the  story 
of  which  was  told  in  several  shapes  by  the  Spanish  poet 
Alfonso  the  Learned  (1226-84).    A  runaway  nun  returns 

Merci '  and  the  other  masterpieces  of  the  condensed  and 
hinted  order  so  dear  to  imaginative  minds."  The  use  of  the 
family  name  Keith  in  Rossetti's  "Rose  Mary"  was  a  coinci- 
dence. His  poem  was  published  (1854)  some  years  before 
Dobell's.  He  thought  of  substituting  some  other  name  for 
Keith,  but  could  find  none  to  suit  him,  and  so  retained  it. 

*  Cf.  Matthew  Arnold's  "St.  Brandan,"  suggested  by  a 
passage  in  the  old  Irish  "Voyage  of  Bran."  The  traitor  Ju- 
das is  allowed  to  come  up  from  hell  and  cool  himself  on  an 
iceberg  every  Christmas  night  because  he  had  once  given  his 
cloak  to  a  leper  in  the  streets  of  Joppa. 

f  "Ballads  and  Songs,"  London,  1895. 


264  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

in  penitence  to  her  convent,  and  is  met  at  the  gate  by  the 
Virgin  Mary,  who  has  taken  her  likeness  and  kept  her 
place  for  her  during  the  years  of  her  absence.  Or  read 
"  A  New  Ballad  of  Tannhauser,"  *  which  contradicts 
"  the  idea  of  the  inherent  impurity  of  nature  "  by  an  in- 
terpretation of  the  legend  in  a  sense  quite  the  reverse  of 
Wagner's.  Tannhauser's  dead  staff  blossoms  not  as  a 
sign  of  forgiveness,  but  to  show  him  that  "  there  was  no 
need  to  be  forgiven."  The  modern  balladist  attacks  the 
ascetic  Middle  Age  with  a  shaft  from  its  own  quiver. 

But  it  is  time  to  turn  from  minor  poets  to  acknowledged 
masters;  and  above  all  to  the  greatest  of  modern  English 
artists  in  verse,  the  representative  poet  of  the  Victorian 
era.  Is  Tennyson  to  be  classed  with  the  romantics?  His 
workmanship,  when  most  truly  characteristic,  is  romantic 
in  the  sense  of  being  pictorial  and  ornate,  rather  than 
classically  simple  or  severe.  He  assimilated  the  rich 
manner  of  Keats,  whose  influence  is  perceptible  in  his 
early  poems.  His  art,  like  Keats',  is  eclectic  and  rem- 
iniscent, choosing  for  its  exercise  with  equal  impartial- 
ity whatever  was  most  beautiful  in  the  world  of  Grecian 
fable  or  the  world  of  mediaeval  legend.  But  unlike 
Keats,  he  lived  to  add  new  strings  to  his  lyre;  he  went 
on  to  sing  of  modern  life  and  thought,  of  present-day 
problems  in  science  and  philosophy,  of  contemporary 
politics,  the  doubt,  unrest,  passion,  and  faith  of  his  own 
century.  To  find  work  of  Tennyson's  that  is  romantic 
throughout,  in  subject,  form,  and  spirit  alike,  we  must 
look  among  his  earlier  collections  (1830,  1832,  1842). 
For  this  was  a  phase  which  he  passed  beyond,  as  Millais 
outgrew  his  youthful  Pre-Raphaelitism,  or  as  Goethe 
*"New  Ballads,"  London,  1897. 


cDiffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    265 

left  behind  him  his  "Gotz"  and  "Werther"  period  and 
widened  out  into  larger  utterance.  Mr.  Stedman  speaks 
of  the  "  Gothic  feeling  "  in  "  The  Lady  of  Shalott,"  and 
in  ballads  like  "Oriana"  and  "The  Sisters,"  describing 
them  as  "  work  that  in  its  kind  is  fully  up  to  the  best  of 
those  Pre-Raphaelites  who,  by  some  arrest  of  develop- 
ment, stop  precisely  where  Tennyson  made  his  second 
step  forward,  and  censure  him  for  having  gone  beyond 
them."  *  This  estimate  may  be  accepted  so  far  as  it 
concerns  "  The  Lady  of  Shalott,"  which  is  known  to  have 
worked  strongly  upon  Rossetti's  imagination;  but  surely 
"  The  Sisters  "  and  "  Oriana  "  do  not  rank  with  the  best 
Pre-Raphaelite  work.  The  former  is  little  better  than  a 
failure;  and  the  latter,  which  provokes  a  comparison,  not 
to  Tennyson's  advantage,  with  the  fine  old  ballad,  "  Helen 
of  Kirkconnell,"  is  a  weak  thing.  The  name  Oriana  has 
romantic  associations — it  is  that  of  the  heroine  of  "  Ama- 
dis  de  Gaul" — but  the  damnable  iteration  of  it  as  a 
ballad  burden  is  irritating.  Mediaeval  motifs  are  rather 
slightly  handled  in  "The  Golden  Supper"  (from  the 
"Decameron,"  4th  novel,  10th  day);  "The  Beggar 
Maid"  (from  the  ballad  of  "King  Cophetua  and  the 
Beggar  Maid  "  in  the  "  Reliques  ")  ;  and  more  adequately 
in  "  Godiva,"  a  blank-verse  rendering  of  the  local  legend 
of  Coventry,  in  which  an  attempt  is  made  to  preserve 
something  of  the  antique  roughness  under  the  smooth 
Vergilian  elegance  of  Tennyson's  diction.  "The  Day 
Dream  "  was  a  recasting  of  one  of  Perrault's  fairy  tales, 
"  The  Sleeping  Beauty,"  under  which  title  a  portion  of 
it  had  appeared  in  the  "  Poems  Chiefly  Lyrical  "  of  1830. 

*" Victorian  Poets."    By  E.  C.  Stedman.     New  York,  1886 
(tenth  ed.),  p.  155. 


266  <iA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

Tennyson  has  written  many  greater  poems  than  this,  but 
few  in  which  the  special  string  of  romance  vibrates  more 
purely.  The  tableau  of  the  spellbound  palace,  with  all 
its  activities  suspended,  gave  opportunity  for  the  display 
of  his  unexampled  pictorial  power  in  scenes  of  still  life; 
and  the  legend  itself  supplied  that  charmed  isolation 
from  the  sphere  of  reality  which  we  noticed  as  so  impor- 
tant a  part  of  the  romantic  poet's  stock-in-trade  in  "  Chris- 
tabel "  and  "The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes"— 

"The  hall-door  shuts  again  and  all  is  still." 

Poems  like  "The  Day  Dream"  and  "The  Princess" 
make  it  evident  that  Scott  and  Coleridge  and  Keats  had 
so  given  back  the  Middle  Ages  to  the  imagination  that 
any  future  poet,  seeking  free  play  in  a  realm  unhampered 
by  actual  conditions — "apart  from  place,  withholding 
time " — was  apt  to  turn  naturally,  if  not  inevitably,  to 
the  feudal  times.  The  action  of  "The  Day  Dream" 
proceeds  no-where  and  no-when.  The  garden — if  we 
cross-examine  it — is  a  Renaissance  garden : 

"Soft  lustre  bathes  the  range  of  urns 
On  every  slanting  terrace-lawn  : 
The  fountain  to  its  place  returns, 
Deep  in  the  garden  lake  withdrawn. " 

The  furnishings  of  the  palace  are  a  mixture  of  mediaeval 
and  Louis  Quatorze — clocks,  peacocks,  parrots,  golden 
mantle  pegs : — • 

"Till  all  the  hundred  summers  pass, 

The  beams  that  through  the  oriel  shine 
Make  prisms  in  every  carven  glass 
And  beaker  brimm'd  with  noble  wine." 

But  the  impression,  as  a  whole,  is  of  the  Middle  Age  of 


diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.   267 

poetic  convention,  if  not  of  history;  the  enchanted  date- 
less era  of  romance  and  fairy  legend. 

"  St.  Agnes  "  and  "  Sir  Galahad,"  its  masculine  coun- 
terpart, sound  the  old  Catholic  notes  of  saintly  virginity 
and  mystical,  religious  rapture,  the  Gottesminne  of  me- 
diaeval hymnody.  Not  since  Southwell's  "  Burning  Babe  " 
and  Crashaw's  "  Saint  Theresa "  had  any  English  poet 
given  such  expression  to  those  fervid  devotional  moods 
which  Sir  Thomas  Browne  describes  as  "  Christian  anni- 
hilation, ecstasies,  exolution,  liquefaction,  transforma- 
tion, the  kiss  of  the  spouse,  gustation  of  God  and  m- 
gression  into  the  divine  shadow."  This  vein,  we  have 
noticed,  is  wanting  in  Scott.  On  the  other  hand,  it  may 
be  noticed  in  passing,  rTennyson's  attitude  towards  nature 
is  less  exclusively  romantic — in  the  narrow  sense — than 
Scott's.  He,  too,  is  conscious  of  the  historic  associa- 
tions of  place.     In  Tennyson,  as  in  Scott, — 

"The  splendour  falls  on  castle  walls 
And  snowy  summits  old  in  story  "  * — 

but,  in  general,  his  treatment  of  landscape,  in  its  human 

relations,  is  subtler  and  more  intimate.) 

"  St.  Agnes  "  and  "  Sir  Galahad  "  are  monologues,  but 

lyric  and  not  dramatic  in  Browning's  manner.     There  is 

a  dramatic  falsity,  indeed,  in  making  Sir  Galahad  say  of 

himself — 

"My  strength  is  as  the  strength  of  ten 
Because  my  heart  is  pure, " 

and  the  poem  would  be  better  in  the  third  person.     "  St. 
Simeon  Stylites"  is  a  dramatic  monologue  more  upon 

*This  famous  lyric,  one  of  the  " inserted  "  songs  in  "The 
Princess, "  was  inspired  by  the  note  of  a  bugle  on  the  Lakes 
of  Killarney. 


268  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Browning's  model,  i.e.,  a  piece  of  apologetics  and  self- 
analysis.  But  in  this  province  Tennyson  is  greatly 
Browning's  inferior. 

"The  Princess"  (1847)  *s  representative  of  that 
"  splendid  composite  of  imagery,"  and  that  application 
of  modern  ideas  to  legendary  material,  or  to  invented 
material  arbitrarily  placed  in  an  archaic  setting,  which 
are  characteristic  of  this  artist.  The  poem's  sub-title  is 
"  A  Medley,"  because  it  is 

" — made  to  suit  with  time  and  place, 
A  Gothic  ruin  and  a  Grecian  house, 
A  talk  of  college  and  of  ladies'  rights, 
A  feudal  knight  in  silken  masquerade, 
And,  yonder,  shrieks  and  strange  experiments." 

The  problem  is  a  modern  one — the  New  Woman.  No 
precise  historic  period  is  indicated.  The  female  univer- 
sity is  full  of  classic  lore  and  art,  but  withal  there  are 
courts  of  feudal  kings,  with  barons,  knights,  and  squires, 
and  shock  of  armoured  champions  in  the  lists. 
*  But  the  special  service  of  Tennyson  to  romantic  poetry 
lay  in  his  being  the  first  to  give  a  worthy  form  to  the 
great  Arthurian  saga ;  and  the  modern  masterpiece  of  that 
poetry,  all  things  considered,  is  his  "Idylls  of  the 
King."  Not  so  perfect  and  unique  a  thing  as  "  The 
Ancient  Mariner";  less  freshly  spontaneous,  less  stir- 
ringly alive  than  "  The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,"  Ten- 
nyson's Arthuriad  has  so  much  wider  a  range  than  Cole- 
ridge's ballad,  and  is  sustained  at  so  much  higher  a  level 
than  Scott's  romance,  that  it  outweighs  them  both  in 
importance.  The  Arthurian  cycle  of  legends,  emerging 
from  Welsh  and  Breton  mythology;  seized  upon  by 
French  romancers  of  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries, 


diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    269 

who  made  of  Arthur  the  pattern  king,  of  Lancelot  the 
pattern  knight,  and  of  the  Table  Round  the  ideal  insti- 
tute  of  chivalry;  gathering  about  itself  accretions  like 
the  Grail  Quest  and  the  Tristram  story;  passing  by  trans- 
lation into  many  tongues,  but  retaining  always  its  scene 
in  Great  or  Lesser  Britain,  the  lands  of  its  origin,  fur- 
nished the  modern  English  romancer  with  a  groundwork 
of  national,  though  not  Anglo-Saxon  epic  stuff,  which  cor- 
responds more  nearly  with  the  Charlemagne  epos  in 
France,  and  the  Nibelung  hero  Saga  in  Germany,  than 
anything  else  which  our  literature  possesses.  And  a 
national  possession,  in  a  sense,  it  had  always  remained. 
The  story  in  outline  and  in  some  of  its  main  episodes 
was  familiar.  Arthur,  Lancelot,  Guinivere,  Merlin, 
Modred,  Iseult,  Gawaine,  were  well-known  figufes,  like 
Robin  Hood  or  Guy  of  Warwick,  in  Shakspere^s  time  as 
in  Chaucer's.  But  the  epos,  as  a  whole,  had  never  found 
its  poet.  Spenser  had  evaporated  Arthur  ipto  allegory. 
Milton  had  dallied  with  the  theme  and  put  it  by.*  The 
Elizabethan  drama,  which  went  so  far  afield  in  search  of 
the  moving  accident,  had  strangely  missed  its  chance 
here,  bringing  the  Round  Table  heroes  upon  its  stage 
only  in  masque  and  pageant  (Justice  Shallow  "  was  Sir 
Dagonet  in  Arthur's  show  "),  or  in  some  such  perform- 
ance as  the  rude  old  Seneca  tragedy  of  "  The  Misfortunes 
of  Arthur."     In  1695  Sir  Richard  Blackmore  published 

*See  vol.  i.,  pp.  146-47.  Dryden,  like  Milton,  had  designs 
upon  Arthur.  See  introduction  to  the  first  canto  of  "Mar- 
in ion  " : 

" — Dryden,  in  immortal  strain, 
Had  raised  the  Table  Round  again, 
But  that  a  ribald  king  and  court 
Bade  him  toil  on,  to  make  them  sport." 


270  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

his  "  Prince  Arthur,"  an  epic  in  ten  books  and  in  rimed 
couplets, enlarged  in  1697  into  "King  Arthur"  in  twelve 
books.  Blackmore  professed  to  take  Vergil  as  his  model. 
A  single  passage  from  his  poem  will  show  how  much 
chance  the  old  chivalry  tale  had  in  the  hands  of  a  minor 
poet  of  King  William's  reign.  Arthur  and  his  company 
have  landed  on  the  shores  of  Albion,  where 

"  Rich  wine  of  Burgundy  and  choice  champagne 
Relieve  the  toil  they  suffered  on  the  main  ; 
But  what  more  cheered  them  than  their  meats  and  wine, 
Was  wise  instruction  and  discourse  divine 
From  Godlike  Arthur's  mouth." 

There  is  no  need,  in  taking  a  summary  view  of  Tenny- 
son's "  Idylls,"  to  go  into  the  question  of  sources,  or  to 
inquire  whether  Arthur  was  a  historical  chief  of  North 
Wales,  or  whether  he  signified  the  Great  Bear  (Arcturus) 
in  Celtic  mythology,  and  his  Round  Table  the  circle  de- 
scribed by  that  constellation  about  the  pole  star.*  Ten- 
nyson went  no  farther  back  for  his  authority  than  Sir 
Thomas  Malory's  "Morte  Darthur,"  printed  by  Caxton* 
in  1485,  a  compilation  principally  from  old  French 
Round  Table  romances.  This  was  the  final  mediaeval 
shape  of  the  story  in  English.  It  is  somewhat  wander- 
ing and  prolix  as  to  method,  but  written  in  delightful 
prose.  The  story  of  "  Enid,"  however  (under  its  various 
titles  and  arrangements  in  successive  editions),  he  took 
from  Lady  Charlotte  Guest's  translation  of  the  Welsh 
"  Mabinogion  "  (1838-49). 

*  For  a  discussion  of  these  and  similar  matters  and  a  bibli- 
ography of  Arthurian  literature,  the  reader  should  consult  Dr. 
H.  Oskar  Sommer's  scholarly  reprint  and  critical  edition  of 
"Le  Morte  Darthur.  By  Syr  Thomas  Malory, "  three  vols. , 
London,  1889-91. 


'Diffused  'Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    271 

Before  deciding  upon  the  heroic  blank  verse  and  a 
loosely  epic  form,  as  most  fitting  for  his  purpose,  Tenny- 
son had  retold  passages  of  Arthurian  romance  in  the 
ballad  manner  and  in  various  shapes  of  riming  stanza. 
The  first  of  these  was  "The  Lady  of  Shalott"  (1832), 
identical  in  subject  with  the  later  idyll  of  "Lancelot 
and  Elaine,"  but  fanciful  and  even  allegorical  in  treat- 
ment. Shalott  is  from  Ascalot,  a  variant  of  Astolat,  in 
the  old  metrical  romance — not  Malory's — of  the  "  Morte 
Arthur."  The  fairy  lady,  who  sees  all  passing  sights  in 
her  mirror  and  weaves  them  into  her  magic  web,  has  been 
interpreted  as  a  symbol  of  art,  which  has  to  do  properly 
only  with  the  reflection  of  life.  When  the  figure  of  Lan- 
celot is  cast  upon  the  glass,  a  personal  emotion  is  brought 
into  her  life  which  is  fatal  to  her  art.  She  is  "  sick  of 
shadows,"  and  looks  through  her  window  at  the  substance. 
Then  her  mirror  cracks  from  side  to  side  and  the  curse 
is  come  upon  her.  Other  experiments  of  the  same  kind 
were  "  Sir  Galahad  "  and  "  Sir  Lancelot  and  Queen  Gui- 
nivere"  (both  in  1842).  The  beauty  of  all  these  ballad 
beginnings  is  such  that  one  is  hardly  reconciled  to  the 
loss  of  so  much  romantic  music,  even  by  the  noble  blank 
verse  and  the  ampler  narrative  method  which  the  poet 
finally  adopted.  They  stand  related  to  the  "Idylls" 
very  much  as  Morris'  "  Defence  of  Guenevere  "  stands  to 
his  "  Earthly  Paradise." 

Thoroughly  romantic  in  content,  the  "Idylls  of  the 
King  "  are  classical  in  formf  They  may  be  compared  to 
Tasso's  "  Gierusalemme  Liberata,"  in  which  the  imper- 
fectly classical  manner  of  the  Renaissance  is  applied  to 
a  Gothic  subject,  the  history  of  the  Crusades.  The  first 
specimen  given  was  the  "Morte  d' Arthur"  of  1842,  set 


272  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

in  a  framework  entitled  "The  Epic,"  in  which  "the  poet, 
Everard  Hall,"  reads  to  his  friends  a  fragment  from  his 
epic,  "  King  Arthur,"  in  twelve  books.  All  the  rest  he 
has  burned.     For — 

"Why  take  the  style  of  those  heroic  times? 
For  nature  brings  not  back  the  Mastodon, 
Nor  we  those  times  ;  and  why  should  any  man 
Remodel  models?  these  twelve  books  of  mine 
Were  faint  Homeric  echoes." 

The  "  fragment "  is  thus  put  forward  tentatively  and 
with  apologies — apologies  which  were  little  needed;  for 
the  "Morte  d' Arthur,"  afterwards  embedded  in  "The 
Passing  of  Arthur,"  remains  probably  the  best,  and  cer- 
tainly the  most  Homeric  passage  in  the  "  Idylls."  Ten- 
nyson's own  quality  was  more  Vergilian  than  Homeric, 
but  the  models  which  he  here  remodels  were  the  Ho- 
meric epics.  He  chose  for  his  measure  not  the  Spense- 
rian stanza,  nor  the  ottava  rima  of  Tasso,  nor  the  octosyl- 
lables of  Scott  and  the  chivalry  romances,  but  the  heroic 
blank  verse  which  Milton  had  fixed  as  the  vehicle  of  Eng- 
lish classical  epic.  He  adopts  Homer's  narrative  prac- 
tices :  the  formulated  repetitions  of  phrase,  the  pictorial 
comparisons,  the  conventional  epithets  (in  moderation), 
and  his  gnomic  habit — 

"  O  purblind  race  of  miserable  men, "  etc. 

The  original  four  idylls  were  published  in  1859.* 
Thenceforth  the  series  grew  by  successive  additions  and 
rearrangements  up  to  the  completed  "Idylls"  of  1888, 
twelve  in  number — besides  prologue  and  epilogue — ac- 

*  Two  of  them,  however,  had  been  printed  privately  in  1857 
under  the  title  of  "  Enid  and  Nimue  :  the  true  and  the  false. 
"  Nimue  "  was  the  first  form  of  Vivien. 


^Diffused  ^Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.    273 

cording  to  the  plan  foreshadowed  in  "  The  Epic."  The 
story  of  Arthur  had  thus  occupied  Tennyson  for  over  a 
half  century.  Though  modestly  entitled  "Idylls,"  by 
reason  of  the  episodic  treatment,  the  poem  when  finished 
was,  in  fact,  an  epic ;  but  an  epic  that  lacked  the  formal 
unity  of  the  "^Eneid"  and  the  "Paradise  Lost,"  or  even 
of  the  "  Iliad."  It  resembled  the  Homeric  heroic  poems 
more  than  the  literary  epics  of  Vergil  and  Milton,  in 
being  not  the  result  of  a  single  act  of  construction,  but 
a  growth  from  the  gradual  fitting  together  of  materials 
selected  from  a  vast  body  of  legend.  This  legendary 
matter  he  reduced  to  an  epic  unity.  The  adventures  in 
Malory's  romance  are  of  very  uneven  value,  and  it 
abounds  in  inconsistencies  and  repetitions.  He  also  re- 
distributed the  ethical  balance.  Lancelot  is  the  real 
hero  of  the  old  "Morte  Darthur,"  and  Guinivere — the 
Helen  of  romance — goes  almost  uncensured.  Malory's 
Arthur  is  by  no  means  "  the  blameless  king  "  of  Tenny- 
son, who  makes  of  him  a  nineteenth-century  ideal  of 
royal  knighthood,  and  finally  an  allegorical  type  of  Soul 
at  war  with  Sense.  The  downfall  of  the  Round  Table, 
that  order  of  spiritual  knight-errantry  through  which  the 
king  hopes  to  regenerate  society,  happens  through  the 
failure  of  his  knights  to  rise  to  his  own  high  level  of 
character;  in  a  degree,  also,  because  the  emprise  is  di- 
verted from  attainable  practical  aims  to  the  fantastic 
quest  of  the  Holy  Grail.  The  sin  of  Lancelot  and  the 
Queen,  drawing  after  it  the  treachery  of  Modred,  brings 
on  the  tragic  catastrophe.  This  conception  is  latent  in 
Malory,  but  it  is  central  in  Tennyson;  and  everywhere 
he  subtilises,  refines,  elevates,  and,  in  short,  modernises 
the  Motivirung  in  the  old  story.     Does  he  thereby  also 


274  <^  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

weaken  it?  Censure  and  praise  have  been  freely  be- 
stowed upon  Tennyson's  dealings  with  Malory.  Thus  it 
is  complained  that  his  Arthur  is  a  prig,  a  curate,  who 
preaches  to  his  queen  and  lectures  his  court,  and  whose 
virtue  is  too  conscious;  that  the  harlot  Vivien  is  a  poor 
substitute  for  the  damsel  of  the  lake  who  puts  Merlin  to 
sleep  under  a  great  rock  in  the  land  of  Benwick ;  that  the 
gracious  figure  of  Gawain  suffers  degradation  from  the 
application  of  an  effeminate  moral  standard  to  his  shin- 
ing exploits  in  love  and  war;  that  modern  convenances 
are  imposed  upon  a  society  in  which  they  do  not  belong 
and  whose  joyous,  robust  naivete'  is  hurt  by  them.* 

The  allegorical  method  tried  in  "  The  Lady  of  Sha- 
lott,"  but  abandoned  in  the  earlier  "  Idlyls,"  creeps  in 
again  in  the  later;  particularly  in  "Gareth  and  Lynette" 
(1872),  in  the  elaborate  symbolism  of  the  gates  of  Came- 
lot,  and  in  the  guardians  of  the  river  passes,  whom 
Gareth  successively  overcomes,  and  who  seem  to  repre- 
sent the  temptations  incident  to  the  different  ages  of 
man.  The  whole  poem,  indeed,  has  been  interpreted  in 
a  parabolic  sense,  Merlin  standing  for  the  intellect,  the 
Lady  of  the  Lake  for  religion,  etc.  Allegory  was  a  fa- 
vourite mediaeval  mode,  and  the  Grail  legend  contains  an 
element  of  mysticism  which  invites  an  emblematic  treat- 
ment.    But  the  attraction  of  this  fashion  for  minds  of  a 

*  Matthew  Arnold  writes  in  one  of  his  letters :  "  I  have  a 
strong  sense  of  the  irrationality  of  that  period  [the  Middle 
AgesJ  and  of  the  utter  folly  of  those  who  take  it  seriously  and 
play  at  restoring  it ;  still  it  has  poetically  the  greatest  charm 
and  refreshment  possible  for  me.  The  fault  I  find  with  Ten- 
nyson, in  his  '  Idylls  of  the  King, '  is  that  the  peculiar  charm 
of  the  Middle  Age  he  does  not  give  in  them.  There  is  some- 
thing magical  about  it,  and  I  will  do  something  with  it  before 
I  have  done." 


diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century,    275 

Platonic  cast  is  dangerous  to  art:  the  temptation  to  find 
a  meaning  in  human  life  more  esoteric  than  any  afforded 
by  the  literal  life  itself.  A  delicate  balance  must  be 
kept  between  that  presentation  of  the  concrete  which 
makes  it  significant  by  making  it  representative  and  typi- 
cal, and  that  other  presentation  which  dissolves  the  in- 
dividual into  the  general,  by  making  it  a  mere  abstrac- 
tion. Were  it  not  for  Dante  and  Hawthorne  and  the  second 
part  of  "  Faust,"  one  would  incline  to  say  that  no  crea- 
tive genius  of  the  first  order  indulges  in  allegory.  Homer 
is  never  allegorical  except  in  the  episode  of  Circe; 
Shakspere  never,  with  the  doubtful  exception  of  "  The 
Tempest."  The  allegory  in  the  " Idylls  of  the  King"  is 
not  of  the  obvious  kind  employed  in  the  "  Faery  Queene  " ; 
but  Tennyson,  no  less  than  Spenser,  appeared  to  feel  that 
the  simple  retelling  of  an  old  chivalry  tale,  without  im- 
parting to  it  some  deeper  meaning,  was  no  work  for  a 
modern  poet. 

Tennyson  has  made  the  Arthur  Saga,  as  a  whole,  pe- 
culiarly his  own.  But  others  of  the  Victorian  poets 
have  handled  detached  portions  of  it.  William  Mor- 
ris* "Defence  of  Guenevere"  (1858)  anticipated  the 
first  group  of  "Idylls."  Swinburne's  "Tristram  of 
Lyonesse"  (1882)  dealt  at  full  length,  and  in  a  very  dif- 
ferent spirit,  with  an  epicyclic  legend  which  Tennyson 
touched  incidentally  in  "  The  Last  Tournament."  Mat- 
thew Arnold's  "Tristram  and  Iseult"  was  a  third  manip- 
ulation of  the  legend,  partly  in  dramatic,  partly  in  narra- 
tive form,  and  in  changing  metres.  It  follows  another 
version  of  Tristram's  death,  and  the  story  of  Vivian  and 
Merlin  which  Iseult  of  Brittany  tells  her  children  is 
quite  distinct  from  the  one   in  the  "  Idylls."     Iseult  of 


276  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Brittany — not  Iseult  of  Cornwall — is  the  heroine  of 
Arnold's  poem.  Thomas  Westwood's  "Quest  of  the 
Sancgreall "  is  still  one  more  contribution  to  Arthurian 
poetry  of  which  a  mere  mention  must  here  suffice. 

For  our  review  threatens  to  become  a  catalogue.  To 
such  a  degree  had  mediaevalism  become  the  fashion,  that 
nearly  every  Georgian  and  Victorian  poet  of  any  preten- 
sions tried  his  hand  at  it.  Robert  Browning  was  not 
romantic  in  Scott's  way,  nor  in  Tennyson's.     His  busi- 

— ness'was  with  the  soul.     The  picturesqueness  of  the  ex- 
ternal conditions  in  which  soul  was  placed  was  a  matter 

t  of  indifference.  To-day  was  as  good  as  yesterday.  Now 
and  then  occurs  a  title  with  romantic  implications — 
"Childe  Roland  to  the  Dark  Tower  Came,"  e.g.,  bor- 
rowed from  a  ballad  snatch  sung  by  the  Fool  in  "  Lear  " 
(Roland  is  Roland  of  the  "  Chanson  ").  But  the  poem 
proves  to  be  a  weird  study  in  landscape  symbolism  and 
the  history  of  some  dark  emprise,  the  real  nature  of 
which  is  altogether  undiscoverable.  "  Count  Gismond," 
again,  is  the  story  of  a  combat  in  the  lists  at  Aix  in 
Provence,  in  which  a  knight  vindicates  a  lady's  honour 
with  his  lance,  and  slays  her  traducer  at  her  feet.  But 
this  is  a  dramatic  monologue  like  any  other,  and  only 
accidentally  mediaeval.  "The  Heretic's  Tragedy:  A 
Middle  Age  Interlude,"  is  mediaeval  without  being  ro- 
mantic. It  recounts  the  burning,  at  Paris,  a.d.  13 14,  of 
Jacques  du  Bourg-Molay,  Grand  Master  of  the  Templars; 
and  purports  to  be  a  sort  of  canticle,  with  solo  and 
chorus,  composed  two  centuries  after  the  event  by  a 
Flemish  canon  of  Ypres,  to  be  sung  at  hocktide  and  fes- 
tivals. The  childishness  and  devout  buffoonery  of  an 
old  miracle  play  are  imitated  here,  as  in   Swinburne's 


diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.   277 

"Masque  of  Queen  Bersabe."  This  piece  and  "Holy 
Cross  Day  "  are  dramatic,  or  monodramatic,  grotesques ; 
and  in  their  apprehension  of  this  trait  of  the  mediaeval 
mind  are  on  a  par  with  Hugo's  "  Pas  d'armes  du  Roi 
Jean"  and  "La  Chasse  du  Burgrave."  But  Browning's 
mousings  in  the  Middle  Ages  after  queer  freaks  of  con- 
science or  passion  were  occasional.  If  any  historical 
period,  more  than  another,  had  special  interest  for  him, 
it  was  the  period  of  the  Italian  Renaissance.  Yet  Ruskin 
said:  "  Robert  Browning  is  unerring  in  every  sentence  he 
writes  of  the  Middle  Ages." 

Among  Mrs.  Browning's  poems,  which,  it  needs  hardly 
be  said,  are  not  prevailingly  "Gothic,"  there  are  three 
interesting  experiments  in  ballad  romance:  "The  Ro- 
maunt  of  the  Page,"  "  The  Lay  of  the  Brown  Rosary," 
and  "  The  Rime  of  the  Duchess  May."  In  all  of  these 
she  avails  herself  of  the  mediaeval  atmosphere,  simply  to 
play  variations  on  her  favourite  theme,  the  devotedness  of 
woman's  love.  The  motive  is  the  same  as  in  poems  of 
modern  life  like  "Bertha  in  the  Lane"  and  "Aurora 
Leigh."  The  vehemence  of  this  nobly  gifted  woman, 
her  nervous  and  sometimes  almost  hysterical  emotional- 
ism, are  not  without  a  disagreeable  quality.  With  greater 
range  and  fervour,  she  had  not  the  artistic  poise  of  the 
Pre-Raphaelite  poetess,  Christina  Rossetti.  In  these 
romances,  as  elsewhere,  she  is  sometimes  shrill  and  often 
mannerised.  "  The  Romaunt  of  the  Page  "  is  the  tale  of 
a  lady  who  attends  her  knight  to  the  Holy  Land,  dis- 
guised as  a  page,  and  without  his  knowledge.  She  saves 
his  life  several  times,  and  finally  at  the  cost  of  her  own. 
A  prophetic  accompaniment  or  burden  comes  in  ever  and 
anon  in  the  distant  chant  of  nuns  over  the  dead  abbess. 


278  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

"Beati !  beati  mortui." 
"  The  Lay  of  the  Brown  Rosary  "  is  a  charming  but  un- 
even piece,  in  four  parts  and  a  variety  of  measures,  about 
a  girl  who,  while  awaiting  her  lover's  return  from  the 
war,  learns  in  a  dream  that  she  must  die,  and  purchases 
seven  years  of  life  from  the  ghost  of  a  wicked  nun  whose 
body  has  been  immured  in  an  old  convent  wall.  The 
spirit  gives  the  bride  a  brown  rosary  which  she  wears 
under  her  dress,  but  her  kiss  kills  the  bridegroom  at  the 
altar.  The  most  spirited  and  well-sustained  of  these 
ballad  poems  is  "  The  Rime  of  the  Duchess  May}"  in 
which  the  heroine  rides  off  the  battlements  with  her  hus- 
band. "Toll  slowly,"  runs  the  refrain.  Mrs.  Browning 
employs  some  archaisms,  such  as  chapHley  chambere^  ladit. 
The  stories  are  seemingly  of  her  own  invention,  and  have 
not  quite  the  genuine  accent  of  folk-song. 

Even  Matthew  Arnold  and  Thomas  Hood,  representa- 
tives in  their  separate  spheres  of  anti-romantic  tenden- 
cies, made  occasional  forays  into  the  Middle  Ages.  But 
who  thinks  of  such  things  as  "  The  Plea  of  the  Midsum- 
mer Fairies  "  or  "  The  Two  Peacocks  of  Bedfont "  when 
Hood  is  mentioned ;  and  not  rather  of  "  The  Bridge  of 
Sighs  "and  "  The  Song  of  the  Shirt "  ?  Or  who,  in  spite* 
of  "Balder  Dead"  and  "Tristram  and  Iseult,"  would 
classify  Arnold's  clean-cut,  reserved,  delicately  intellec- 
tual work  as  romantic?  Hood  was  an  artist  of  the  terri- 
ble as  well  as  of  the  comic;  witness  his  "Last  Man," 
"  Haunted  House,"  and  "  Dream  of  Eugene  Aram."  If 
he  could  have  welded  the  two  moods  into  a  more  intimate 
union,  and  applied  them  to  legendary  material,  he  might 
have  been  a  great  artist  in  mediaeval  grotesque — a  spe- 
cies of  Gothic  Hoffman  perhaps.     As  it  is,  his  one  ro- 


diffused  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.   279 

mantic  success  is  the  charming  lyric  "Fair  Ines."  His 
longer  poems  in  this  kind,  in  modifications  of  ottava 
rima  or  Spenserian  stanza,  show  Keats'  influence  very 
clearly.  The  imagery  is  profuse,  but  too  distinct  and 
without  the  romantic  chiaroscuro.  "  The  Water  Lady  "  is 
a  manifest  imitation  of  "La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci," 
and  employs  the  same  somewhat  unusual  stanza  form. 
Hood — incorrigible  punster — who  had  his  jest  at  every- 
thing, jested  at  romance.  He  wrote  ballad  parodies — 
"The  Knight  and  the  Dragon,"  etc.— and  an  ironical 
"  Lament  for  the  Decline  of  Chivalry  " : 

"Well  hast  thou  cried,  departed  Burke, 
All  chivalrous  romantic  work 

Is  ended  now  and  past ! 
That  iron  age — which  some  have  thought 
Of  mettle  rather  overwrought — 

Is  now  all  overcast." 

And  finally,  "The  Saint's  Tragedy"  (1848)  of  Charles 
Kingsley  affords  a  case  in  which  mediaeval  biography  is 
made  the  pretext  for  an  assault  upon  mediaeval  ideas.  It 
is  a  tendenz  drama  in  five  acts,  founded  upon  the  "  Life 
of  St.  Elizabeth  of  Hungary,"  as  narrated  by  her  contem- 
porary, Dietrich  the  Thuringian.  Its  militant  Protes- 
tantism is  such  as  might  be  predicted  from  Kingsley's 
well-known  resentment  of  the  Romanist  attitude  towards 
marriage  and  celibacy;  from  his  regard  for  freedom  of 
thought ;  and  from  that  distrust  and  contempt  of  Popish 
priestcraft  which  involved  him  in  his  controversy  with 
Newman.  "The  Middle  Age,"  says  the  Introduction, 
"  was,  in  the  gross,  a  coarse,  barbarous,  and  profligate 
age.  ...  It  was,  in  fact,  the  very  ferocity  and  foulness 
of  the  time  which,  by  a  natural  revulsion,  called  forth  at 


280  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

the  same  time  the  Apostolic  holiness  and  the  Manichean 
asceticism  of  the  mediaeval  saints.  ...  So  rough  and 
common  a  life-picture  of  the  Middle  Age  will,  I  am 
afraid,  whether  faithful  or  not,  be  far  from  acceptable  to 
those  who  take  their  notions  of  that  period  principally 
from  such  exquisite  dreams  as  the  fictions  of  Fouque, 
and  of  certain  moderns  whose  graceful  minds  .  .  .  are, 
on  account  of  their  very  sweetness  and  simplicity,  singu- 
larly unfitted  to  convey  any  true  likeness  of  the  coarse 
and  stormy  Middle  Age.  .  .  .  But  really,  time  enough 
has  been  lost  in  ignorant  abuse  of  that  period,  and  time 
enough  also,  lately,  in  blind  adoration  of  it.  When 
shall  we  learn  to  see  it  as  it  was  ?  " 

Polemic  in  its  purpose  and  anti-Catholic  in  temper, 
"  The  Saint's  Tragedy  "  then  seeks  to  dispel  the  glamour 
which  romance  had  thrown  over  mediaeval  life.  Kings- 
ley's  Middle  Age  is  not  the  holy  Middle  Age  of  the  Ger- 
man "throne-and-altar"  men;  nor  yet  the  picturesque 
Middle  Age  of  Walter  Scott.  It  is  the  cruel,  ignorant, 
fanatical  Middle  Age  of  "The  Amber  Witch"  and  "The 
Succube."  But  Kingsley  was  too  much  of  a  poet  not  to 
feel  those  "  last  enchantments "  which  whispered  to 
Arnold  from  Oxford  towers,  maugre  his  "  strong  sense  of 
the  irrationality  of  that  period."  The  saintly,  as  well 
as  the  human  side,  of  Elizabeth's  character  is  portrayed 
with  sympathy,  though  poetically  the  best  thing  in  the 
drama  are  the  songs  of  the  Crusaders. 

Kingsley,  in  effect,  was  always  good  at  a  ballad.  His 
finest  work  in  this  kind  is  modern,  "The  Last  Bucca- 
neer," "The  Sands  of  Dee,"  "The  Three  Fishers,"  and 
the  like.  But  there  are  the  same  fire  and  swing  in  many 
of  his  romantic  ballads  on  historical  or  legendary  sub- 


'Diffused  Romanticism  in  the  (Nineteenth  Century.    281 

jects,  such  as  "The  Swan-Neck,"  "The  Red  King," 
"Ballad  of  Earl  Haldan's  Daughter,"  "The  Song  of  the 
Little  Baltung,"  and  a  dozen  more.  Without  the  imag- 
inative witchery  of  Coleridge,  Keats,  and  Rossetti,  in 
the  ballad  of  action  Kingsley  ranks  very  close  to  Scott. 
The  same  manly  delight  in  outdoor  life  and  bold  adven- 
ture, love  of  the  old  Teutonic  freedom  and  strong  feeling 
of  English  nationality  inspire  his  historical  romances, 
only  one  of  which,  however,  "Hereward  the  Wake" 
(1866),  has  to  do  with  the  period  of  the  Middle  Ages. 


CHAPTER    VII. 

Zbe  ipre=1Rapbaelttes. 

In  the  latter  half  of  the  century  the  Italian  Middle 
Age  and  Dante,  its  great  exemplar,  found  new  interpre- 
ters in  the  Rossetti  family;  a  family  well  fitted  by  its 
mixture  of  bloods  and  its  hereditary  aptitudes,  literary 
and  artistic,  to  mediate  between  the  English  genius  and 
whatever  seemed  to  it  alien  or  repellant  in  Dante's 
system  of  thought.  The  father,  Gabriele  Rossetti,  was  a 
political  refugee,  who  held  the  professorship  of  Italian 
in  King's  College,  London,  from  183 1  to  1845,  ano^  was 
the  author  of  a  commentary  on  Dante  which  carried  the 
politico-allegorical  theory  of  the  "  Divine  Comedy "  to 
somewhat  fantastic  lengths.  The  mother  was  half  Eng- 
lish and  half  Italian,  a  sister  of  Byron's  travelling  com- 
panion, Dr.  Polidori.  Of  the  four  children  of  the  mar- 
riage, Dante  Gabriel  and  Christina  became  poets  of 
distinction.  The  eldest  sister,  Maria  Francesca,  a  relig- 
ious devotee  who  spent  her  last  years  as  a  member  of  a 
Protestant  sisterhood,  was  the  author  of  that  unpretentious 
but  helpful  piece  of  Dante  literature,  "A  Shadow  of 
Dante."  The  younger  brother,  William  Michael,  is  well 
known  as  a  biographer,  litt'erateur,  and  art  critic,  as  an 
editor  of  Shelley  and  of  the  works  of  Dante  Gabriel 
Rossetti. 

Other  arts  besides  the  literary  art  had  partaken  in  the 


The  ^Pre-raphaelites.  283 

romantic  movement.  The  eighteenth  century  had  seen 
the  introduction  of  the  new,  or  English,  school  of  land- 
scape gardening;  and  the  premature  beginnings  of  the 
Gothic  revival  in  architecture,  which  reached  a  success- 
ful issue  some  century  later.*  Painting  in  France  had 
been  romanticised  in  the  thirties  pari  passu  with  poetry 
and  drama;  and  in  Germany,  Overbeck  and  Cornelius 
had  founded  a  school  of  sacred  art  which  corresponds,  in 
its  mediaeval  spirit,  to  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood. 
In  England  painting  was  the  last  of  the  arts  to  catch  the 
new  inspiration.  When  the  change  came,  it  evinced  that 
same  blending  of  naturalism  and  Gothicism  which  de- 
fined the  incipient  romantic  movement  of  the  previous 
century.  Painting,  like  landscape  gardening,  returned 
to  nature;  like  architecture,  it  went  back  to  the  past. 
Like  these,  and  like  literature  itself,  it  broke  away  from 
a  tradition  which  was  academic,  if  not  precisely  classic 
in  the  way  in  which  David  was  classic. 

In  1848  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood  was  estab- 
lished by  three  young  painters,  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti, 
John  Everett  Millais,  and  William  Holman  Hunt.  The 
name  expresses  their  admiration  of  the  early  Italian — 
and  notably  the  early  Florentine — religious  painters,  like 
Giotto,  Ghiberti,  Bellini,  and  Fra  Angelica.  In  the  work 
of  these  men  they  found  a  sweetness,  depth,  and  sincerity 
of  devotional  feeling,  a  self-forgetfulness  and  humble 
adherence  to  truth,  which  were  absent  from  the  sophis- 
ticated art  of  Raphael  and  his  successors.  Even  the 
imperfect  command  of  technique  in  these  "primitives" 
had  a  charm.     The  stiffness  and  awkwardness  of  their 

*See  vol.  i.,  chaps,  iv.  and  vii.,  "The  Landscape  Poets" 
and  "The  Gothic  Revival." 


284  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

figure  painting,  their  defects  of  drawing,  perspective,  and 
light  and  shade,  their  lack  of  anatomical  science  were  like 
the  lispings  of  childhood  or  the  artlessness  of  an  old  bal- 
lad. The  immediate  occasion  of  the  founding  of  the 
Brotherhood  was  a  book  of  engravings  which  Hunt  and 
Rossetti  saw  at  Millais'  house,  from  the  frescoes  by  Goz- 
zoli,  Orcagna,  and  others  in  the  Campo  Santo,  at  Pisa ;  the 
same  frescoes,  it  will  be  remembered,  which  so  strongly  im- 
pressed Leigh  Hunt  and  Keats.  Holman  Hunt — though 
apparently  not  his  associates — had  also  read  with  eager  ap- 
proval the  first  volume  of  Ruskin's  "  Modern  Painters,"  in 
which  the  young  artists  of  England  are  advised  to  "  go  to 
nature  in  all  singleness  of  heart  .  .  .  rejecting  nothing, 
selecting  nothing."  Pre-Raphaelitism  was  a  practical, 
as  "  Modern  Painters  "  was  a  theoretical,  protest  against 
the  academic  traditions  which  kept  young  artists  making 
school  copies  of  Raphael,  instructed  them  that  a  third  of 
the  canvas  should  be  occupied  with  a  principal  shadow, 
and  that  no  two  people's  heads  in  the  picture  should  be 
turned  the  same  way,  and  asked,  "  Where  are  you  going 
to  put  your  brown  tree  ?  " 

The  three  original  members  of  the  group  associated 
with  themselves  four  others :  Thomas  Woolner,  the  sculp- 
tor; James  Collinson,  a  painter;  F.  G.  Stephens,  who 
began  as  an  artist  and  ended  as  an  art  critic;  and  Ros- 
setti's  brother  William,  who  was  the  literary  man  of  the 
movement.  Woolner  was  likewise  a  poet,  and  contrib- 
uted to  The   Germ  *  his  two  striking  pieces,  "  My  Beau- 

*This  was  the  organ  of  the  Pre-Raphaelites,  started  in 
1850.  Only  four  numbers  were  issued  (January,  February, 
March,  April),  and  in  the  third  and  fourth  the  title  was 
changed  to  Art  and  Poetry.  The  contents  included,  among 
other  things,  poems  by  Dante  Gabriel  and  Christina  Ros- 


The  "Pre-raphaelites.  285 

tiful  Lady  "  and  "  Of  My  Lady  in  Death."  Among  other 
artists  not  formally  enrolled  in  the  Brotherhood,  but  who 
worked  more  or  less  in  the  spirit  and  principles  of  Pre- 
Raphaelitism,  were  Ford  Madox  Brown,  an  older  man,  in 
whose  studio  Rossetti  had,  at  his  own  request,  been  ad- 
mitted as  a  student;  Walter  Deverell,  who  took  Collin- 
son's  place  when  the  latter  resigned  his  membership  in 
order  to  study  for  the  Roman  Catholic  priesthood;  and 
Arthur  Hughes.* 

But  the  main  importance  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  move- 
ment to  romantic  literature  resides  in  the  poetry  of  Ros- 
setti, and  in  the  inspiration  which  this  communicated  to 
younger  men,  like  Morris  and  Swinburne,  and  through 
them  to  other  and  still  younger  followers.  The  history 
of  English  painting  is  no  part  of  our  subject,  but  Ros- 
setti's  painting  and  his  poetry  so  exactly  reflect  each 
other,  that  some  definition  or  brief  description  of  Pre- 
Raphaelitism  seems  here  to  be  called  for,  ill  qualified  as 
I  feel  myself  to  give  any  authoritative  account  of  the 
matter,  f 

setti.  One  of  the  former's  twelve  contributions  was  "The 
Blessed  Damozel."  The  Oxford  and  Cambridge  Magazine, 
which  ran  through  the  year  1856  and  was  edited  by  William 
Morris  and  Edward  Burne-Jones,  was  also  a  Pre-Raphaelite 
journal  and  received  many  contributions  from  Rossetti. 

*The  foreign  strain  in  the  English  Pre-Raphaelites  and  in 
the  painters  and  poets  who  descend  from  them  is  worth  not- 
ing. Rossetti  was  three-fourths  Italian.  Millais'  parents 
were  Channel  Islanders— from  Jersey— and  he  had  two  mother 
tongues,  English  and  French.  Burne-Jones  is  of  Welsh  blood, 
and  Alma  Tadema  of  Frisian  birth.  Among  Neo-Pre-Ra- 
phaelite  poets,  the  names  of  Theophile  Marzials  and  Arthur 
O'Shaughnessy  speak  for  themselves. 

f  Let  the  reader  consult  the  large  and  rapidly  increasing 
literature  on  the  English  Pre-Raphaelites.  I  do  not  profess 
to  be  a  very  competent  guide  here,  but  I  have  found  the  fol- 
lowing works  all  in  some  degree  enlightening.     "Autobio- 


286  cA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

And  first  as  to  methods :  the  Pre-Raphaelites  rejected 
the  academic  system  whereby  the  canvas  was  prepared 
by  rubbing  in  bitumen,  and  the  colours  were  laid  upon  a 
background  of  brown,  grey,  or  neutral  tints.  Instead  of 
this,  they  spread  their  colours  directly  upon  the  white, 
unprepared  canvas,  securing  transparency  by  juxtaposi- 
tion rather  than  by  overlaying.  They  painted  their  pic- 
tures bit  by  bit,  as  in  frescoes  or  mosaic  work,  finishing 
each  portion  as  they  went  along,  until  no  part  of  the  can- 
vas was  left  blank.  The  Pre-Raphaelite  theory  was 
sternly  realistic.  They  were  not  to  copy  from  the  antique, 
but  from  nature.  For  landscape  background,  they  were 
to  take  their  easels  out  of  doors.  In  figure  painting  they 
were  to  work,  if  possible,  from  a  living  model  and  not 
from  a  lay  figure.  A  model  once  selected,  it  was  to  be 
painted  as  it  was  in  each  particular,  and  without  imagi- 
native deviation.  "  Every  Pre-Raphaelite  landscape  back- 
ground," wrote  Ruskin,  "  is  painted,  to  the  last  touch,  in 
the  open  air  from  the  thing  itself.  Every  Pre-Raphaelite 
figure,  however  studied  in  expression,  is  a  true  portrait 

graphical  Notes  of  William  Bell  Scott,"  two  vols.,  New 
York,  1892.  "English  Contemporary  Art."  Translated  from 
the  French  of  R.  de  la  Sizeranne,  Westminster,  1898.  "D. 
G.  Rossetti  as  Designer  and  Writer. "  W.  M.  Rossetti,  Lon- 
don, 1889.  "The  Rossettis."  E.  L.  Cary,  New  York,  1900. 
"Dante  Rossetti  and  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Movement."  Esther 
Wood,  New  York,  1894.  "Pre-Raphaelitism."  J.  Ruskin, 
New  York,  i860.  "The  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood."  Hol- 
man  Hunt  in  Contemporary  Review,  vol.  xlix.  (three  articles). 
"Encyclopaedia  Britannica,"  article  " Rossetti, "  by  Theodore 
Watts.  Of  course  the  standard  lives  and  memoirs  by  William 
Rossetti,  Hall  Caine,  William  Sharp,  and  Joseph  Knight,  as 
well  as  Rossetti's  "Family  Letters,"  "Letters  to  William  Al- 
lingham, "  etc.,  afford  criticisms  of  the  movement  from  various 
points  of  view.  Lists  of  Rossetti '  s  paintings  and  drawings  are 
given  by  several  of  these  authorities,  with  photographs  or 
engravings  of  his  most  famous  masterpieces. 


The  Tre-Ttypbaelites.  287 

of  some  living  person.  Every  minute  accessory  is 
painted  in  the  same  manner."  *  In  this  fashion  their 
earliest  works  were  executed.  In  Rossetti's  "  Girlhood 
of  Mary  Virgin,"  exhibited  in  1849,  the  figure  of  St. 
Anne  is  a  portrait  of  the  artist's  mother;  the  Virgin,  of 
his  sister  Christina;  and  Joseph,  of  a  man-of-all-work 
employed  in  the  family.  In  Millais'  "Lorenzo  and  Isa- 
bella"— a  subject  from  Keats — Isabella's  brother,  her 
lover,  and  one  of  the  guests,  are  portraits  of  Deverell, 
Stephens,  and  the  two  Rossettis.  But  this  severity  of 
realism  was  not  long  maintained.  It  was  a  discipline, 
not  a  final  method.  Even  in  Rossetti's  second  painting, 
"  Ecce  Ancilla  Domini,"  the  faces  of  the  Virgin  and  the 
angel  Gabriel  are  blendings  of  several  models ;  although, 
in  its  freedom  from  convention,  its  austere  simplicity, 
and  endeavour  to  see  the  fact  as  it  happened,  the  piece 
is  in  the  purest  Pre-Raphaelite  spirit.  Ruskin  insisted 
that,  while  composition  was  necessarily  an  affair  of  the 
imagination,  the  figures  and  accessories  of  a  picture 
should  be  copies  from  the  life.  In  the  early  days  of  the 
Brotherhood  there  was  an  ostentatious  conscientiousness 
in  observing  this  rule.  We  hear  a  great  deal  in  Ros- 
setti's correspondence  about  the  brick  wall  at  Chiswick 
which  he  copied  into  his  picture  "  Found,"  and  about  his 
anxious  search  for  a  white  calf  for  the  countryman's  cart 
in  the  same  composition.  But  all  the  Pre-Raphaelites 
painted  from  the  lay  figure  as  well  as  from  the  living 
model,  and  Rossetti,  in  particular,  relied  quite  as  much 
on  memory  and  imagination  as  upon  the  object  before 
him.     W.  B.  Scott  thinks  that  his  most  charming  works 

*" Lectures  on  Architecture  and  Painting."     Delivered  at 
Edinburgh  in  1853.     Lecture  iv.,  "  Pre-Raphaelitism. " 


288  iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

were  the  small  water-colours  on  Arthurian  subjects, 
"  done  entirely  without  nature  and  a  good  deal  in  the 
spirit  of  illuminated  manuscripts,  with  very  indifferent 
drawing  and  perspective  nowhere."  As  for  Millais,  he 
soon  departed  from  rigidly  Pre-Raphaelite  principles,  and 
became  the  most  successful  and  popular  of  British  artists 
in  genre.  In  natural  talent  and  cleverness  of  execution 
he  was  the  most  brilliant  of  the  three;  in  imaginative 
intensity  and  originality  he  was  Rossetti's  inferior — as 
in  patience  and  religious  earnestness  he  was  inferior  to 
Hunt.  It  was  Hunt  who  stuck  most  faithfully  to  the 
programme  of  Pre-Raphaelitism.  He  spent  laborious 
years  in  the  East  in  order  to  secure  the  exactest  local 
truth  of  scenery  and  costume  for  his  Biblical  pieces: 
"  Christ  in  the  Shadow  of  Death,"  "  Christ  in  the  Tem- 
ple," and  "The  Scapegoat."  While  executing  the  last- 
named,  he  pitched  his  tent  on  the  shores  of  the  Dead  Sea 
and  painted  the  desert  landscape  and  the  actual  goat  from 
a  model  tied  down  on  the  edge  of  the  sea.  Hunt's 
"  Light  of  the  World  "  was  one  of  the  masterpieces  of  the 
school,  and  as  it  is  typical  in  many  ways,  may  repay  de- 
scription. Ruskin  pronounced  it  "the  most  perfect  in- 
stance of  expressional  purpose  with  technical  power  which 
the  world  has  yet  produced." 

In  this  tall,  narrow  canvas  the  figure  of  Christ  occupies 
nearly  half  the  space.  He  holds  a  lantern  in  his  hand 
and  knocks  at  a  cottage  door.  The  face — said  to  be  a 
portrait  of  Venables,  curate  of  St.  Paul's,  Oxford — is 
quite  unlike  the  type  which  Raphael  has  made  traditional. 
It  is  masculine — even  rugged — seamed  with  lines  of  care, 
and  filled  with  an  expression  of  yearning.  There  is 
anxiety  and  almost  timidity  in  his  pose  as  he  listens  for 


The  "Pre-raphaelites.  289 

an  answer  to  his  knock.  The  nails  and  bolts  of  the  door 
are  rusted;  it  is  overgrown  with  ivy  and  the  tall  stalks 
and  flat  umbels  of  fennel.  The  sill  is  choked  with  net- 
tles and  other  weeds,  emblems  all  of  the  long  sleep  of 
the  world  which  Christ  comes  to  break.  The  full  moon 
makes  a  halo  behind  his  head  and  shines  through  the 
low  boughs  of  an  orchard,  whose  apples  strew  the  dark 
grass  in  the  foreground,  sown  with  spots  of  light  from  the 
star-shaped  perforations  in  the  lantern-cover.  They  are 
the  apples  of  Eden,  emblems  of  the  Fall.  Everything, 
in  fact,  is  symbolical.  Christ's  seamless  white  robe, 
with  its  single  heavy  fold,  typifies  the  Church  catholic ; 
the  jewelled  clasps  of  the  priestly  mantle,  one  square  and 
one  oval,  are  the  Old  and  New  Testaments.  The  golden 
crown  is  enwoven  with  one  of  thorns,  from  which  new 
leaves  are  sprouting.  The  richly  embroidered  mantle 
hem  has  its  meaning,  and  so  have  the  figures  on  the  lan- 
tern. To  get  the  light  in  this  picture  right,  Hunt  painted 
out  of  doors  in  an  orchard  every  moonlight  night  for 
three  months  from  nine  o'clock  till  five.  While  working 
in  his  studio,  he  darkened  one  end  of  the  room,  put  a 
lantern  in  the  hand  of  his  lay-figure  and  painted  this 
interior  through  the  hole  in  a  curtain.  On  moonlight 
nights  he  let  the  moon  shine  in  through  the  window  to 
mix  with  the  lantern  light.  It  was  a  principle  with  the 
Brotherhood  that  detail,  though  not  introduced  for  its 
own  sake,  should  be  painted  with  truth  to  nature.  Hunt, 
especially,  took  infinite  pains  to  secure  minute  exactness 
in  his  detail.  Ruskin  wrote  in  enthusiastic  praise  of 
the  colours  of  the  gems  on  the  mantle  clasp  in  "  The 
Light  of  the  World,"  and  said  that  all  the  Academy 
critics  and  painters  together  could  not  have  executed  one 


290  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

of  the  nettle  leaves  at  the  bottom  of  the  picture.  The 
lizards  in  the  foreground  of  Millais'  "  Ferdinand  Lured 
by  Ariel"  (exhibited  in  1850)  were  studied  from  life; 
and  Scott  makes  merry  over  the  shavings  on  the  floor  of 
the  carpenter  shop  in  the  same  artist's  "  Christ  in  the 
House  of  his  Parents,"  a  composition  which  was  fero- 
ciously ridiculed  by  Dickens  in  "  Household  Words." 

The  symbolism  which  is  so  pronounced  a  feature  in 
"  The  Light  of  the  World "  is  common  to  all  the  Pre- 
Raphaelite  art.  It  is  a  mediaeval  note,  and  Rossetti 
learned  it  from  Dante.  Symbolism  runs  through  the 
"  Divine  Comedy  "  in  such  touches  as  the  rush,  emblem 
of  humility,  with  which  Vergil  girds  Dante  for  his  jour- 
ney through  Purgatory ;  the  constellation  of  four  stars — 

"Non  viste  mai  fuor  ch'  alia  prima  gente  " — 

typifying  the  cardinal  virtues ;  the  three  different  coloured 
steps  to  the  door  of  Purgatory;  *  and  thickening  into  the 
elaborate  apocalyptic  allegory  of  the  griffin  and  the  car 
of  the  church,  the  eagle  and  the  mystic  tree  in  the  last 
cantos  of  the  "  Purgatorio."  In  Hunt's  "  Christ  in  the 
Shadow  of  Death,"  the  young  carpenter's  son  is  stretch- 
ing his  arms  after  work,  and  his  shadow,  thrown  upon 
the  wall,  is  a  prophecy  of  the  crucifixion.  In  Millais' 
"Christ  in  the  House  of  his  Parents,"  the  boy  has 
wounded  the  palm  of  his  hand  upon  a  nail,  another 
foretokening  of  the  crucifixion.  In  Rossetti's  "  Girlhood 
of  Mary  Virgin,"  Joseph  is  training  a  vine  along  a  piece 
of  trellis  in  the  shape  of  the  cross;  Mary  is  copying  in 
embroidery  a  three-flowered  white  lily  plant,  growing  in 
a  flower-pot  which  stands  upon  a  pile  of  books  lettered 

*Cf.  Milton :  "  Each  stair  mysteriously  was  meant "  ("  P.  L."). 


The  Tre-^apbaelttes.  291 

with  the  names  of  the  cardinal  virtues.  The  quaint 
little  child  angel  who  tends  the  plant  is  a  portrait  of  a 
young  sister  of  Thomas  Woolner.  Similarly,  in  "  Ecce 
Ancilla  Domini, '  the  lily  of  the  annunciation  which 
Gabriel  holds  is  repeated  in  the  piece  of  needlework 
stretched  upon  the  'broidery  frame  at  the  foot  of  Mary's 
bed.  In  "  Beata  Beatrix "  the  white  poppy  brought  by 
the  dove  is  the  symbol  at  once  of  chastity  and  of  death ; 
and  the  shadow  upon  the  sun-dial  marks  the  hour  of 
Beatrice's  beatification.  Again,  in  "Dante's  Dream," 
poppies  strew  the  floor,  emblems  of  sleep  and  death;  an 
expiring  lamp  symbolises  the  extinction  of  life;  and  a 
white  cloud  borne  away  by  angels  is  Beatrice's  departing 
soul.  Love  stands  by  the  couch  in  flame-coloured  robes, 
fastened  at  the  shoulder  with  the  scallop  shell  which  is 
the  badge  of  pilgrimage.  In  Millais"  "  Lorenzo  and  Isa- 
bella "  the  salt-box  is  overturned  upon  the  table,  signify- 
ing that  peace  is  broken  between  Isabella's  brothers  and 
their  table  companion.  Doves  are  everywhere  in  Ros- 
setti's  pictures,  embodiments  of  the  Holy  Ghost  and  the 
ministries  of  the  spirit.  Rossetti  labelled  his  early  man- 
uscript poems  "  Poems  of  the  Art  Catholic  " ;  and  the 
Pre-Raphaelite  heresy  was  connected  by  unfriendly  critics  ) 
with  the  Anglo-Catholic  or  Tractarian  movement  at  Ox-  / 
ford.  William  Sharp,  in  speaking  of  "that  splendid 
outburst  of  Romanticism  in  which  Coleridge  was  the  first 
and  most  potent  participant,"  and  of  the  lapse  or  ebb 
that  followed  the  death  of  Coleridge,  Byron,  Shelley,  and 
Keats,  resumes :  "  At  last  a  time  came  when  a  thrill  of 
expectation,  of  new  desire,  of  hope,  passed  through  the 
higher  lives  of  the  nation ;  and  what  followed  thereafter 
were  the  Oxford  movement  in  the  Church  of  England, 


292  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

the  Pre-Raphaelite  movement  in  art,  and  the  far-reaching 
Gothic  revival.  Different  as  these  movements  were  in 
their  primary  aims,  and  still  more  differing  in  the  indi- 
vidual representations  of  interpreters,  they  were  in  reality 
closely  interwoven,  one  being  the  outcome  of  the  other. 
The  study  of  mediaeval  art,  which  was  fraught  with  such 
important  results,  was  the  outcome  of  the  widespread 
ecclesiastical  revival,  which  in  its  turn  was  the  outcome 
of  the  Tractarian  movement  in  Oxford.  The  influence 
of  Pugin  was  potent  in  strengthening  the  new  impulse, 
and  to  him  succeeded  Ruskin  with  *  Modern  Painters ' 

and  Newman  with  the  '  Tracts  for  the  Times.'     Primar- 
- 
ily the  Pre-Raphaelite  movement  had  its  impulse  in  the 

Oxford  religious  revival;  and  however  strange  it  may 
seem  to  say  that  such  men  as  Holman  Hunt  and  Rossetti 
.  .  .  followed  directly  in  the  footsteps  of  Newman  and 
Pusey  and  Keble,  it  is  indubitably  so."  *  Ruskin,  too, 
cautioned  his  young  friends  that  "  if  their  sympathies 
with  the  early  artists  lead  them  into  medievalism  or  Ro- 
manism, they  will  of  course  come  to  nothing.  But  I  be- 
lieve there  is  no  danger  of  this,  at  least  for  the  strongest 
among  them.  There  may  be  some  weak  ones  whom  the 
Tractarian  heresies  may  touch;  but  if  so,  they  will  drop 
off  like  decayed  branches  from  a  strong  stem."  f  One 
of  these  weak  ones  who  dropped  off  was  James  Collinson, 
a  man  of  an  ascetic  and  mystical  piety — like  Werner  or 
Brentano.  He  painted,  among  other  things,  "  The  Re- 
nunciation of  St.  Elizabeth"  from  Kingsley's  "Saint's 
Tragedy."     "  The  picture,"  writes  Scott,  "  resembled  the 

*" Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti:  a  record  and   a   study,"  Lon- 
don, 1882,  pp.  40-41. 
f'Pre-Raphaelitism,"  p.  23,  note. 


The  Tre-%apbaelttes.  293 

feckless  dilettanteism  of  the  converts  who  were  then 
dropping  out  of  their  places  in  Oxford  and  Cambridge 
into  Mariolatry  and  Jesuitism.  In  fact,  this  James  Col- 
linson  actually  did  become  Romanist,  wanted  to  be  a 
priest,  painted  no  more,  but  entered  a  seminary,  where 
they  set  him  to  clean  the  boots  as  an  apprenticeship  in  hu- 
mility and  obedience.  They  did  not  want  him  as  a  priest ; 
they  were  already  getting  tired  of  that  species  of  convert; 
so  he  left,  turned  to  painting  again,  and  disappeared."  * 

M.  de  la  Sizeranne  is  rather  scornful  of  these  metaphys- 
ical definitions  of  Pre-Raphaelitism ;  "  for  to  characterise 
a  Pre-Raphaelite  picture  by  saying  that  it  was  inspired 
by  the  Oxford  movement,  is  like  attempting  to  explain 
the  mechanism  of  a  lock  by  describing  the  political  opin- 
ions of  the  locksmith."  f  He  himself  proposes,  as  the 
distinguishing  characteristics  of  Pre-Raphaelite  art,  orig- 
inality of  gesture  and  vividness  of  colouring.  This  is 
the  professional  point  of  view ;  but  the  student  of  litera- 
ture is  less  concerned  with  such  technical  aspects  of  the 
subject  than  with  those  spiritual  aspects  which  connect  the 
work  of  the  Pre-Raphaelites  with  the  great  mediaeval  or 
romantic  revival. 

When  Ruskin  came  to  the  rescue  of  the  P.-R.  B.  in 
185 1,  in  those  letters  to  the  Times,  afterwards  reprinted 
in  pamphlet  form  under  the  title  "Pre-Raphaelitism," 
he  recognised  the  propriety  of  the  name,  and  the  real 
affinity  between  the  new  school  and  the  early  Italian 
schools  of  sacred  art.     Mediaeval  art,  he  asserted, J  was 


♦"Autobiographical  Notes  of  William  Bell  Scott,"  vol.  i,p. 
281. 
I "  English  Contemporary  Art. "  p.  58. 
}  "  Lectures  on  Architecture  and  Painting,"  1853. 


294  ed  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

religious  and  truthful ;  modern  art  is  profane  and  insin- 
cere. "  In  mediaeval  art,  thought  is  the  first  thing,  exe- 
cution is  the  second;  in  modern  art,  execution  is  the 
first  thing  and  thought  is  the  second.  And  again,  in 
mediaeval  art,  truth  is  first,  beauty  second;  in  modern 
art,  beauty  is  first,  truth  second."  Ruskin  denied  that 
the  Pre-Raphaelites  were  unimaginative,  though  he  al- 
lowed that  they  had  a  disgust  for  popular  forms  of  grace 
and  prettiness.  And  he  pointed  out  a  danger  in  the  fact 
that  their  principles  confined  them  to  foreground  work, 
and  called  for  laborious  finish  on  a  small  scale.  In 
"  Modern  Painters  "  he  complained  that  the  Pre-Raphael- 
ites should  waste  a  whole  summer  in  painting  a  bit  of 
oak  hedge  or  a  bed  of  weeds  by  a  duck  pond,  which  caught 
their  fancy  perhaps  by  reminding  them  of  a  stanza  in 
Tennyson.  Nettles  and  mushrooms,  he  said,  were  good 
to  make  nettle  soup  and  fish  sauce ;  but  it  was  too  bad 
that  the  nobler  aspects  of  nature,  such  as  the  banks  of 
the  castled  Rhine,  should  be  left  to  the  frontispieces 
in  the  Annuals.  Ruskin,  furthermore,  denied  that  the 
drawing  of  the  Pre-Raphaelites  was  bad  or  their  perspec- 
tive false ;  or  that  they  imitated  the  errors  of  the  early 
Florentine  painters,  whom  they  greatly  excelled  in  tech- 
nical accomplishment.  Meanwhile  be  it  remarked  that 
the  originality  of  gesture  in  Pre-Raphaelite  figure  paint- 
ing, which  M.  de  la  Sizeranne  notices,  was  only  one 
more  manifestation  of  the  romantic  desire  for  individu- 
ality and  concreteness  as  against  the  generalising  aca- 
demicism of  the  eighteenth  century.* 

As  poets,  the  Pre-Raphaelites  derive  from  Keats  rather 
than  from  Scott,  in  their  exclusive  devotion  to  beauty,  to 
♦See  vol.  i.,  p.  44. 


The  T're-^apbaeliles.  295 

art  for  art's  sake ;  in  their  single  absorption  in  the  pas- 
sion of  love;  and  in  their  attraction  towards  the  more 
esoteric  side  of  mediaeval  life,  rather  than  towards  its 
broad,  public,  and  military  aspects.* 

Rossetti's  position  in  the  romantic  literature  of  the 
last  half  of  the  ninetenth  century  is  something  like  Cole- 
ridge's in  the  first  half.  Unlike  Coleridge,  he  was  the 
leader  of  a  school,  the  master  of  a  definite  group  of  art- 
ists and  poets.     His  actual  performance,  too,  far  exceeds 

♦"The  return  of  this  school  was  to  a  mediaevalism  different 
from  the  tentative  and  scrappy  mediaevalism  of  Percy,  from 
the  genial  but  slightly  superficial  mediaevalism  of  Scott,  and 
even  from  the  more  exact  but  narrow  and  distinctly  conven- 
tional mediaevalism  of  Tennyson.  .  .  .  Moreover,  though  it 
may  seem  whimsical  or  extravagant  to  say  so,  these  poets 
added  to  the  very  charm  of  mediaeval  literature,  which  they 
thus  revived,  a  subtle  something  which  differentiates  it  from 
— which,  to  our  perhaps  blind  sight,  seems  to  be  wanting  in 
— mediaeval  literature  itself.  It  is  constantly  complained  (and 
some  of  those  who  cannot  go  all  the  way  with  the  complainants 
can  see  what  they  mean)  that  the  graceful  and  labyrinthine 
stories,  the  sweet  snatches  of  song,  the  quaint  drama  and  leg- 
end of  the  Middle  Ages  lack — to  us — life  ;  that  they  are  shad- 
owy, unreal,  tapestry  on  the  wall,  not  alive  even  as  living 
pageants  are.  By  the  strong  touch  of  modernness  which 
these  poets  and  the  best  of  their  followers  introduced  into 
their  work,  they  have  given  the  vivification  required  "  (Saints- 
bury,  "  Literature  of  the  Nineteenth  Century, "  p.  439) .  Pre- 
Raphaelitism  "is  a  direct  and  legitimate  development  of  the 
great  romantic  revival  in  England.  .  .  .  Even  Tennyson, 
much  more  Scott  and  Coleridge  and  their  generation,  had 
entered  only  very  partially  into  the  treasures  of  mediaeval 
literature,  and  were  hardly  at  all  acquainted  with  those  of 
mediaeval  art.  Conybeare,  Kemble.  Thorpe,  Madden  were 
only  in  Tennyson's  own  time  reviving  the  study  of  Old  and 
Middle^English.  Early  French  and  Early  Italian  were  but 
fust  being  opened  up.  Above  all,  the  Oxford  Movement  di- 
rected attention  to  mediaeval  architecture,  literature,  thought, 
as  had  never  been  the  case  before  in  England,  and  as  has 
never  been  the  case  at  all  in  any  other  country"  ("A  Short 
History  of  English  Literature,"  by  G.  Saintsbury,  London, 
1898,  p.  779). 


296  cA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Coleridge's  in  amount,  if  not  in  value.  But  like  Cole- 
ridge, he  was  a  seminal  mind,  a  mind  rich  in  original 
suggestions,  which  inspired  and  influenced  younger  men 
to  carry  out  its  ideas,  often  with  a  fluency  of  utterance 
and  a  technical  dexterity  both  in  art  and  letters  which 
the  master  himself  did  not  possess.  Holman  Hunt, 
Millais,  and  Burne-Jones  among  painters,  Morris  and 
Swinburne  among  poets,  were  disciples  of  Rossetti  who 
in  some  ways  outdid  him  in  execution.  His  pictures 
were  rarely  exhibited,  and  no  collection  of  his  poems  was 
published  till  1870.  Meanwhile,  however,  many  of  these 
had  circulated  in  manuscript,  and  "  secured  a  celebrity 
akin  in  kind  and  almost  equal  in  extent  to  that  enjoyed 
by  Coleridge's  '  Christabel '  during  the  many  years  pre- 
ceding 1816  in  which  it  lay  in  manuscript.  Like  Cole- 
ridge's poem  in  another  important  particular,  certain  of 
Rossetti's  ballads,  while  still  unknown  to  the  public,  so 
far  influenced  contemporary  poetry  that  when  they  did 
at  length  appear,  they  had  all  the  seeming  to  the  unini- 
tiated of  work  imitated  from  contemporary  models,  in- 
stead of  being,  as  in  fact  they  were,  the  primary  source 
of  inspiration  for  writers  whose  names  were  earlier  estab- 
lished." *  William  Morris,  e.g.,  had  printed  four  vol- 
umes of  verse  in  advance  of  Rossetti;  and  the  earliest 
of  these,  "  The  Defence  of  Guenevere,"  which  contains 
his  most  intensely  Pre-Raphaelite  work  and  that  most 
evidently  done  in  the  spirit  of  Rossetti's  teachings,  saw 
the  light  (1858)  twelve  years  before  Rossetti's  own. 
Swinburne,  too,  had  published  three  volumes  of  poetry 
before    1870,  including   the   "Poems   and  Ballads"  of 

♦"Recollections  of  Dante  Gabriel   Rossetti,"  by  T.    Hall 
Caine,  London,  1882,  p.  41. 


The  ePre-cJ{apbaelttes.  297 

1866,  in  which  Rossetti's  influence  is  plainly  manifest; 
and  he  had  already  secured  a  wide  fame  at  a  time  when 
the  elder  poet's  reputation  was  still  esoteric  and  mainly 
confined  to  the  cknacle.  William  M.  Rossetti,  in  describ- 
ing the  literary  influences  which  moulded  his  brother's 
tastes,  tells  us  that  "  in  the  long  run  he  perhaps  enjoyed 
and  revered  Coleridge  beyond  any  other  modern  poet 
whatsoever."  * 

It  is  worth  while  to  trace  these  literary  influences 
with  some  detail,  since  they  serve  to  link  the  neo- 
romantic  poetry  of  our  own  time  to  the  product  of  that 
older  generation  which  had  passed  away  before  Ros- 
setti came  of  age.  It  is  interesting  to  find  then,  that  at 
the  age  of  fifteen  (1843)  ne  taught  himself  enough  Ger- 
man to  enable  him  to  translate  Burger's  "Lenore,"  as 
Walter  Scott  had  done  a  half-century  before.  This  devil 
of  a  poem  so  haunts  our  history  that  it  has  become  as 
familiar  a  spirit  as  Mrs.  Radcliffe's  bugaboo  appari- 
tions, and  our  flesh  refuses  any  longer  to  creep  at  it.  It 
is  quite  one  of  the  family.  It  would  seem,  indeed,  as  if 
Burger's  ballad  was  set  as  a  school  copy  for  every  young 
romanticist  in  turn  to  try  his  'prentice  hand  upon. 
Fortunately,  Rossetti's  translation  has  perished,  as  has 
also  his  version — some  hundred  lines — of  the  earlier  por- 
tion of  the  "  Nibelungenlied."  But  a  translation  which 
he  made  about  the  same  time  of  the  old  Swabian  poet, 
Hartmann  von  Aue's  "  Der  Arme  Heinrich  "  (Henry  the 
Leper)  is  preserved,  and  was  first  published  in  1886. 
This  poem,  it  will  be  remembered,  was  the  basis  of 
Longfellow's   "Golden  Legend"   (185 1).     Rossetti  did 

*u The  Collected  Works  of  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti."  Ed- 
ited by  W.  M.  Rossetti,  two  vols.,  London,  1886. 


298  <A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

not  keep  up  his  German,  and  in  later  years  he  never  had 
much  liking  for  Scandinavian  or  Teutonic  literature. 
He  was  a  Latin,  and  he  made  it  his  special  task  to  inter- 
pret to  modern  Protestant  England  whatever  struck  him 
as  most  spiritually  intense  and  characteristic  in  the 
Latin  Catholic  Middle  Age.  The  only  Italian  poet 
whom  he  "earnestly  loved"  was  Dante.  He  did  not 
greatly  care  for  Petrarch,  Boccaccio,  Ariosto,  and  Tasso 
— the  Renaissance  poets — though  in  boyhood  he  had 
taken  delight  in  Ariosto,  just  as  he  had  in  Scott  and 
Byron.  But  that  was  a  stage  through  which  he  passed; 
none  of  these  had  any  ultimate  share  in  Rossetti's  cul- 
ture. At  fifteen  he  wrote  a  ballad  entitled  "  Sir  Hugh 
the  Heron,"  founded  on  a  tale  of  Allan  Cunningham, 
but  taking  its  name  and  motto  from  the  lines  in  "  Mar- 

mion  " — 

"Sir  Hugh  the  Heron  bold, 
Baron  of  Twisell  and  of  Ford, 
And  Captain  of  the  Hold. " 

A  few  copies  of  this  were  printed  for  family  circula- 
tion by  his  fond  grandfather,  G.  Polidori.  Among 
French  writers  he  had  no  modern  favourites  beyond 
Hugo,  Musset,  and  Dumas.  But  like  all  the  neo-roman- 
ticists,iie  was  strongly  attracted  by  Francois  Villon,  that 
strange  Parisian  poet,  thief,  and  murderer  of  the  fifteenth 
century.  He  made  three  translations  from  Villon,  the 
best  known  of  which  is  the  famous  "Ballad  of  Dead 
Ladies  "  with  its  felicitous  rendering  of  the  refrain — 

"But  where  are  the  snows  of  yester  year?" 
(Mais  ou  sont  les  neiges  d'antan?) 

There  are  at  least  three  good  English  verse  renderings 
of  this  ballad  of  Villon ;   one  by  Andrew  Lang ;  one  by 


The  cPre-cI{apbaelites.  299 

John  Payne,  and  doubtless  innumerable  others,  unknown 
to  me  or  forgotten.  In  fact,  every  one  translates  it  now- 
adays, as  every  one  used  to  translate  Burger's  ballad. 
It  is  the  "Lenore"  of  the  neo-romanticists.  Rossetti 
was  a  most  accomplished  translator,  and  his  version  of 
Dante's  "Vita  Nuova"  and  of  the  "Early  Italian  Poets" 
(1861) — reissued  as  "Dante  and  His  Circle"  (1874) — is 
a  notable  example  of  his  skill.  There  are  two  other 
specimens  of  old  French  minstrelsy,  and  two  songs  from 
Victor  Hugo's  "Burgraves"  among  his  miscellaneous 
translations;  and  William  Sharp  testifies  that  Rossetti 
at  one  time  thought  of  doing  for  the  early  poetry  of 
France  what  he  had  already  done  for  that  of  Italy,  but 
never  found  the  leisure  for  it.*  Rossetti  had  no  knowl- 
edge of  Greek,  and  "  the  only  classical  poet,"  says  his 
brother,  "  whom  he  took  to  in  any  degree  worth  speaking 
of  was  Homer,  the  *  Odyssey'  considerably  more  than 
the  *  Iliad.' "  This,  I  presume,  he  knew  only  in  transla- 
tion, but  the  preference  is  significant,  since,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  "Odyssey"  is  the  most  romantic  of  epics. 
Among  English  poets,  he  preferred  Keats  to  Shelley,  as 
might  have  been  expected.  Shelley  was  a  visionary  and 
Keats  was  an  artist ;  Shelley  often  abstract,  Keats  always 
concrete.  Shelley  had  a  philosophy,  or  thought  he  had; 
Keats  had  none,  neither  had  Rossetti.  It  is  quite  com- 
prehensible that  the  sensuous  element  in  Keats  would 
attract  a  born  colourist  like  Rossetti  beyond  anything 
in  the  English  poetry  of  that  generation ;  and  I  need  not 
repeat  that  the  latest  Gothic  or  romantic  schools  have  all 
been  taking  Keats'  direction  rather  than  Scott's,  or  even 
than  Coleridge's.  Rossetti's  work,  I  should  say,  e.g., 
*"  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti.     A  Record  and  a  Study,"  p.  305. 


300  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism, 

in  such  a  piece  as  "  The  Bride's  Prelude,"  is  a  good  deal 
more  like  "Isabella"  and  "The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes"  than 
it  is  like  "  The  Ancient  Mariner "  or  "  Christabel "  or 
"The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel."  Rossetti  got  little 
from  Milton  and  Dryden,  or  even  from  Chaucer  and 
Spenser.  Wordsworth  he  valued  hardly  at  all.  In  the 
last  two  or  three  years  of  his  life  he  came  to  have  an 
exaggerated  admiration  for  Chatterton.  Rossetti's  taste, 
like  his  temperament,  was  tinctured  with  morbidness. 
He  sought  the  intense,  the  individual,  the  symbolic,  the 
mystical.  These  qualities  he  found  in  a  supreme  degree 
in  Dante.  Probably  it  was  only  his  austere  artistic  con- 
science which  saved  him  from  the  fantastic — the  merely 
peculiar  or  odd — and  kept  him  from  going  astray  after 
false  gods  like  Poe  and  Baudelaire.  Chaucer  was  a 
mediaeval  poet  and  Spenser  certainly  a  romantic  one,  but 
their  work  was  too  broad,  too  general  in  its  appeal,  too 
healthy,  one  might  almost  say,  to  come  home  to  Ros- 
setti.*     William    Rossetti   testifies   that   "any   writing 

*He  wrote  to  Allingham  in  1855,  apropos  of  the  latter's 
poem  "The  Music  Master" :  "I'm  not  sure  that  it  is  not  too 
noble  or  too  resolutely  healthy.  ...  I  must  confess  to  a  need 
in  narrative  dramatic  poetry  ...  of  something  rather  '  excit- 
ing,'  and  indeed,  I  believe,  something  of  the  'romantic'  ele- 
ment, to  rouse  my  mind  to  anything  like  the  moods  produced 
by  personal  emotion  in  my  own  life.  That  sentence  is  shock- 
ingly ill  worded,  but  Keats'  narratives  would  be  of  the  kind  I 
mean."  Theodore  Watts  ("Encyclopaedia  Britannica,"  arti- 
cle "  Rossetti ")  says  that  "the  purely  romantic  temper  was 
with  Rossetti  a  more  permanent  and  even  a  more  natural  tem- 
per than  with  any  other  nineteenth-century  poet,  even  includ- 
ing the  author  of  '  Christabel '  himself. "  He  thinks  that  all  the 
French  romanticists  together  do  not  equal  the  romantic  feel- 
ing in  a  single  picture  of  Rossetti's  ;  and  he  somewhat  capri- 
ciously defines  the  idea  at  the  core  of  romanticism  as  that  of 
the  evil  forces  of  nature  assailing  man  through  his  sense  of 
beauty.     Analysis  run  mad !     As  to  Poe,  Rossetti  certainly 


The  Tre-ltyphaelites.  301 

about  devils,  spectres,  or  the  supernatural  generally  ...       / 

had  always  a  fascination  for  him."     Sharp  remarks  that 

work  more  opposite  than  Rossetti's  to  the  Greek  spirit 

can  hardly  be  imagined.     "  The  former  [the  Greek  spirit] 

looked  to  light,  clearness,  form  in  painting,  sculpture, 

architecture:  to  intellectual  conciseness  and  definiteness 

1 

in  poetry ;  the  latter  [Rossetti]  looked  mainly  to  diffused 
colour,  gradated  to  almost  indefinite  shades  in  his  art, 
finding  the  harmonies  thereof  more  akin  than  severity  of 
outline  and  clearness  of  form;  while  in  his  poetry  the 
Gothic  love  of  the  supernatural,  the  Gothic  delight  in 
sensuous  images,  the  Gothic  instinct  of  indefiniteness 
and  elaboration,  carried  to  an  extreme,  prevailed.  .  .  . 
He  would  take  more  pleasure  in  a  design  by  .  .  .  Wil- 
liam Blake  .  .  .  than  in  the  more  strictly  artistic  draw- 
ing of  some  revered  classicist;  more  enjoyment  in  the 
weird  or  dramatic  Scottish  ballad  than  in  Pindaric  or 
Horatian  ode;  and  he  would  certainly  rather  have  had 
Shakspere  than  ^Eschylus,  Sophocles,  and  Euripides  put 
together." 

Rossetti's  office  in  the  later  and  further  development  jJ^-> 
of  romantic  art  was  threefold :  First,  to  revive  and  ex- 
press, both  in  painting  and  poetry,  the  religious  spirit  of 
the  early  Florentine  schools;  secondly,  to  give  a  more 
intimate  interpretation  of  Dante  to  the  English  public, 
and  especially  of  Dante's  life  and  personality  and  of  his 


preferred  him  to  Wordsworth.  Hall  Caine  testifies  that  he 
used  to  repeat  "Ulalume"  and  "The  Raven"  from  memory; 
and  that  the  latter  suggested  his  "Blessed  Damozel."  "I 
saw  that  Poe  had  done  the  utmost  it  was  possible  to  do  with 
the  grief  of  the  lover  on  earth,  and  so  I  determined  to  reverse 
the  conditions,  and  give  utterance  to  the  yearning  of  the  loved 
one  in  heaven"  ("Recollections,"  p.  284). 


302  aA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

minor  poetry,  like  the  "Vita  Nuova,"  which  had  not  yet 
been  translated;  thirdly,  to  afford  new  illustrations  of 
mediaeval  life  and  thought,  partly  by  treating  legendary 
matter  in  the  popular  ballad  form,  and  partly  by  treating 
romantic  matter  of  his  own  invention  with  the  rich  colour 
and  sensuous  imagery  which  belonged  to  his  pictorial 
art. 

"  Perhaps,"  writes  Mr.  Caine,*  "  Catholicism  is  itself 
essentially  mediaeval,  and  perhaps  a  man  cannot  possibly 
be  a  '  mediaeval  artist,  heart  and  soul/  without  partaking 
of  a  strong  religious  feeling  that  is  primarily  Catholic — 
so  much  were  the  religion  and  art  of  the  Middle  Ages 
knit  each  to  each.  .  .  .  Rossetti's  attitude  towards  spirit- 
ual things  was  exactly  the  reverse  of  what  we  call  Protes- 
tant. .  .  .  He  constantly  impressed  me  during  the  last 
days  of  his  life  with  the  conviction  that  he  was  by  relig- 
ious bias  of  nature  a  monk  of  the  Middle  Ages."  All 
this  is  true  in  a  way,  yet  Rossetti  strikes  one  as  being 
Catholic,  without  being  religious;  as  mediaeval  rather 
than  Christian.  He  was  agnostic  in  his  belief  and  not 
devout  in  his  practice;  so  that  the  wish  that  he  suddenly 
expressed  in  his  last  illness,  to  confess  himself  to  a 
priest,  affected  his  friends  as  a  singular  caprice.  It  was 
the  romantic  quality  in  the  Italian  sacred  art  of  the  Mid- 
dle Ages  that  attracted  him;  and  it  attracted  him  as  a 
poet  and  painter,  not  as  a  devotee.  There  was  little  in 
Rossetti  of  the  mystical  and  ascetic  piety  of  Novalis  or 
Zacharias  Werner;  nor  of  the  steady  religious  devotion 
of  his  friend  Holman  Hunt,  or  his  own  sister  Christina. 

Rossetti,  by  the  way,  was  never  in  Italy,  though  he  made 
several  visits  to  France  and  Belgium.  A  glance  at  the 
♦"Recollections,"  p.  140. 


UNiVERSH 

£4LfFQf»t& 

'e-^Rapbadites.  303 

list  of  his  designs — extending  to  some  four  hundred 
titles — in  oil,  water-colour,  crayon,  pen  and  ink,  etc., 
will  show  how  impartially  his  interest  was  distributed 
over  the  threefold  province  mentioned  above.  There 
are  sacred  pieces  like  "  Mary  Magdalen  at  the  Door  of 
Simon  the  Pharisee,"  "  St.  Cecily,"  a  "  Head  of  Christ," 
a  "  Triptych  for  Llandaff  Cathedral " ;  Dante  subjects 
such  as  "Paolo  and  Francesca,"  "Beata  Beatrix,"  "La 
Donna  della  Finestra,"  "Giotto  Painting  the  Portrait 
of  Dante " ;  and,  in  greater  number,  compositions  of  a 
purely  romantic  nature — "Fair  Rosamond,"  "La  Belle 
Dame  sans  Merci,"  "The  Chapel  before  the  Lists," 
"  Michael  Scott's  Wooing,"  "  Meeting  of  Sir  Tristram 
and  Yseult,"  "Lady  Lilith,"  "The  Damozel  of  the 
Sanct  Grail,"  "  Death  of  Breuse  sans  Pitie,"  and  the  like. 
It  will  be  noticed  that  some  of  these  subjects  are  taken 
from  the  Round  Table  romances.  Tennyson  was  partly 
responsible  for  the  newly  awakened  interest  in  the 
Arthurian  legend,  but  the  purely  romantic  manner  which 
he  had  abandoned  in  advancing  from  "  Sir  Galahad  "  and 
"The  Lady  of  Shalott"  to  the  "  Morte  d'  Arthur  "  of  1842 
and  the  first  "Idylls"  of  1859,  continued  to  characterise 
the  work  of  the  Pre-Raphaelites  both  in  poetry  and  in 
painting.  Malory's  "  Morte  Darthur "  was  one  of  Ros- 
setti's  favourite  books,  and  he  preferred  it  to  Tennyson, 
as  containing  "the  weird  element  in  its  perfection.  .  .  . 
Tennyson  has  it  certainly  here  and  there  in  imagery,  but 
there  is  no  great  success  in  the  part  it  plays  through  his 
1  Idylls.' "  *  The  five  wood-engravings  from  designs  fur- 
nished by  Rossetti  for  the  Moxon  Tennyson  quarto  of 
1857  include  three  Arthurian  subjects:  "The  Lady  of 
*Caine's  "Recollections,"  p.  266. 


304  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

Shalott,"  "  King  Arthur  Sleeping  in  Avalon,"  and  u  Sir 
Galahad  Praying  in  the  Wood-Chapel."  "Interwoven 
as  were  the  Romantic  revival  and  the  aesthetic  move- 
ment," writes  Mr.  Sharp,  "  it  could  hardly  have  been 
otherwise  but  that  the  young  painter-poet  should  be 
strongly  attracted  to  that  Arthurian  epoch,  the  legendary 
glamour  of  which  has  since  made  itself  so  widely  felt  in 
the  Arthurian  idyls  of  the  laureate.  .  .  .  Mr.  Ruskin 
speaks,  in  his  lecture  on  '  The  Relation  of  Art  to  Relig- 
ion '  delivered  in  Oxford,  of  our  indebtedness  to  Ros- 
setti  as  the  painter  to  whose  genius  we  owe  the  revival 
of  interest  in  the  cycle  of  early  English  legend." 

It  was  in  1857  that  Rossetti,  whose  acquaintance  had 
been  recently  sought  by  three  young  Oxford  scholars, 
Edward  Burne- Jones,  William  Morris,  and  Algernon 
Charles  Swinburne,  volunteered  to  surround  the  gallery  of 
the  new  Union  Club  House  at  Oxford  with  life-size  fres- 
coes from  the  "  Morte  Darthur."  *  He  was  assisted  in 
this  work  by  a  number  of  enthusiastic  disciples.  Burne- 
Jones  had  already  done  some  cartoons  in  colour  for 
stained  glass,  and  Morris  had  painted  a  subject  from  the 
"Morte  Darthur,"  to  wit:  "Sir  Tristram  after  his  Ill- 
ness, in  the  Garden  of  King  Mark's  Palace,  recognised 
by  the  Dog  he  had  given  to  Iseult."  Rossetti's  con- 
tribution to  the  Oxford  decorations  was  "  Sir  Lancelot 
before  the  Shrine  of  the  Sangreal."  Morris*  was  "  Sir 
Palomides'  Jealousy  of  Sir  Tristram  and  Iseult,"  an  inci- 

*Burne-Jones  had  been  attracted  by  Rossetti's  illustration 
of  Allingham's  poem,  "The  Maids  of  Elfinmere,"  and  had 
obtained  an  introduction  to  him  at  London  in  1856.  It  was 
by  Rossetti's  persuasion  that  he  gave  up  the  church  for  the 
career  of  an  artist.  Rossetti  and  Swinburne  some  years  later 
(1862)  became  housemates  for  a  time  at  Chelsea  ;  and  Rossetti 
and  Morris  for  a  number  of  years,  off  and  on,  at  Kelmscott. 


The  cPre-c%apbaelites.  305 

dent  which  he  also  treated  in  his  poetry.  Burne-Jones, 
Valentine  Prinsep,  J.  H.  Pollen,  and  Arthur  Hughes 
likewise  contributed.  Scott  says  that  these  paintings 
were  interesting  as  designs ;  that  they  were  "  poems  more 
than  pictures,  being  large  illuminations  and  treated  in  a 
mediaeval  manner."  But  he  adds  that  not  one  of  the 
band  knew  anything  about  wall  painting.  They  laid 
their  water-colours,  not  on  a  plastered  surface,  but  on  a 
rough  brick  wall,  merely  whitewashed.  They  used  no 
adhesive  medium,  and  in  a  few  months  the  colours  peeled 
off  and  the  whole  series  became  invisible. 

A  co-partnership  in  subjects,  a  duplication  of  treat- 
ment, or  interchange  between  the  arts  of  poetry  and 
painting  characterise  Pre-Raphaelite  work.  For  exam- 
ple, Morris'  poems,  "  The  Blue  Closet "  and  "  The  Tune 
of  Seven  Towers  "  were  inspired  by  the  similarly  entitled 
designs  of  Rossetti.  They  are  interpretations  in  lan- 
guage of  pictorial  suggestions — "word-paintings"  in  a 
truer  meaning  than  that  much-abused  piece  of  critical 
slang  commonly  bears.  In  one  of  these  compositions — a 
water-colour,  a  study  in  colour  and  music  symbolism — 
four  damozels  in  black  and  purple,  white  and  green, 
scarlet  and  white,  and  crimson,  are  singing  or  playing 
on  a  lute  and  clavichord  in  a  blue-tiled  room ;  while  in 
front  of  them  a  red  lily  grows  up  through  the  floor.  To 
this  interior  Morris'  "  stunning  picture  " — as  his  friend 
called  it — adds  an  obscurely  hinted  love  story:  the  bur- 
den of  a  bell  booming  a  death-knell  in  the  tower  over- 
head; the  sound  of  wind  and  sea;  and  the  Christmas 
snows  outside.  Conversely  Rossetti's  painting,  "  Arthur's 
Tomb,"  was  suggested  by  Morris'  so-named  poem  in  his 
1858  volume. 


,) 


306  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Or,  again,  compare  Morris'  poem,  "  Sir  Galahad :  A 
Christmas  Mystery,"  with  the  following  description  of 
Rossetti's  aquarelle,  "  How  Sir  Galahad,  Sir  Bors,  and 
Sir  Percival  were  fed  with  the  Sane  Grael ;  but  Sir  Per- 
civaPs  sister  died  by  the  way  '* :  "  On  the  right  is  painted 
the  altar,  and  in  front  of  it  the  damsel  of  the  Sane  Grael 
giving  the  cup  to  Sir  Galahad,  who  stoops  forward  to 
take  it  over  the  dead  body  of  Sir  Percival's  sister,  who 
lies  calm  and  rigid  in  her  green  robe  and  red  mantle,  and 
near  whose  feet  grows  from  the  ground  an  aureoled  lily ; 
while,  with  his  left  hand,  the  saintly  knight  leads  for- 
ward his  two  companions,  him  who  has  lost  his  sister,  and 
the  good  Sir  Bors.  Behind  the  white-robed  damsel  at 
the  altar,  a  dove,  bearing  the  sacred  casket,  poises  on 
outspread  pinions;  and  immediately  beyond  the  fence 
enclosing  the  sacred  space,  stands  a  row  of  nimbused 
angels,  clothed  in  white  and  with  crossed  scarlet  or  flame- 
coloured  wings."  * 

Rossetti's  powerful  ballad,  "The  King's  Tragedy," 
was  suggested  by  the  mural  paintings  (encaustic)  with 
which  William  Bell  Scott  decorated  the  circular  staircase 
of  Penkill  Castle  in  1865-68.  These  were  a  series  of 
scenes  from  "The  Kinges  Quair"  once  attributed  to 
James  I.  of  Scotland.  The  photogravure  reproduction, 
from  a  painting  by  Arthur  Hughes  of  a  section  of  the 
Penkill  Castle  staircase,  represents  the  king  looking 
from  the  window  of  his  prison  in  Windsor  Castle  at  Lady 
Jane  Beaufort  walking  with  her  handmaidens  in  a  very 
Pre-Raphaelite  garden.  At  the  left  of  the  picture,  Cupid 
aims  an  arrow  at  the  royal  lover.  Rossetti,  Hunt,  and 
Millais  were  all  great  lovers  of  Keats.  Hunt  says  that 
♦Sharp's  "Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti,"  p.  190. 


The  Tre-%apbaelites.  307 

his  "  Escape  of  Madeline  and  Prospero "  was  the  first 
subject  from  Keats  ever  painted,  and  was  highly  ac- 
claimed by  Rossetti.  At  the  formation  of  the  P.-R  B.  in 
1848,  it  was  agreed  that  the  first  work  of  the  Brotherhood 
should  be  in  illustration  of  "  Isabella,"  and  a  series  of 
eight  subjects  was  selected  from  the  poem.  Millais  ex- 
ecuted at  once  his  "Lorenzo  and  Isabella,"  but  Hunt's 
"Isabella  and  the  Pot  of  Basil"  was  not  finished  till 
1867,  and  Rossetti's  part  of  the  programme  was  never 
carried  out.  Rossetti's  "  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci," 
Mr.  J.  M.  Strudwick's  "  Madness  of  Isabella,"  Arthur 
Hughes'  triptych  of  "  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,"  and  Mil- 
lais' great  painting,  "  St.  Agnes'  Eve,"  were  other  tributes 
of  Pre-Raphaelite  art  to  the  young  master  of  romantic 
verse.  _ 

Whether  this  interpenetration  of  poetry  and  painting 
is  of  advantage  to  either,  may  admit  of  question.  Emer- 
son said  to  Scott :  "  We  [Americans]  scarcely  take  to  the 
Rossetti  poetry;  it  does  not  come  home  to  us;  it  is 
exotic."  The  sonnets  of  "The  House  of  Life"  have 
appeared  to  many  readers  obscure  and  artificial,  the  work- 
ing out  in  language  of  conceptions  more  easily  expressi- 
ble by  some  other  art;  expressed  here,  at  all  events, 
through  imagery  drawn  from  a  special  and  even  techni- 
cal range  of  associations.  Such  readers  are  apt  to  imag- 
ine that  Rossetti  suffers  from  a  hesitation  between  poetry 
and  painting;  as  Sidney  Lanier  is  thought  by  some  to 
have  been  injured  artistically  by  halting  midway  between 
music  and  verse.  The  method  proper  to  one  art  intrudes 
into  the  other;  everything  that  the  artist  does  has  the  air 
of  an  experiment;  he  paints  poems  and  writes  pictures. 

A  department  of  Rossetti's  verse  consists  of  sonnets 


308  zA  History  of  English  cl{omanticism. 

written  for  pictures;  pictures  by  Botticelli,  Mantegna, 
Giorgione,  Burne-Jones,  and  others,  and  in  many  cases 
by  himself,  and  giving  thus  a  double  rendering  of  the 
same  invention.  But  even  when  not  so  occasioned,  his 
poems  nearly  always  suggest  pictures.  Their  figures 
seem  to  have  stepped  down  from  some  fifteenth-century 
altar  piece  bringing  their  aureoles  and  golden  back- 
grounds with  them.  This  is  to  be  pictorial  in  a  very  dif- 
ferent sense  from  that  in  which  Tennyson  is  said  to  be 
a  pictorial  poet.  Hall  Caine  informs  us  that  Rossetti 
"  was  no  great  lover  of  landscape  beauty."  His  scenery 
does  not,  like  Wordsworth's  or  Tennyson's,  carry  an  im- 
pression of  life,  of  the  real  outdoors.  Nature  with  Ros- 
setti has  been  passed  through  the  medium  of  another  art 
before  it  comes  into  his  poetry;  it  is  a  doubly  distilled 
nature.  It  is  nature  as  we  have  it  in  the  "  Roman  de  la 
Rose,"  or  the  backgrounds  of  old  Florentine  painters: 
flowery  pleasances  and  orchard  closes,  gardens  with  trel- 
lises and  singing  conduits,  where  ladies  are  playing  at 
the  palm  play.  In  his  most  popular  poem,  "  The  Blessed 
Damozel  " — a  theme  which  he  both  painted  and  sang — 
the  feeling  is  exquisitely  and  veraciously  human.  The 
maiden  is  "homesick  in  heaven,"  and  yearns  back  tow- 
ards the  earth  and  her  lover  left  behind.  Even  so,  with 
her  symbolic  stars  and  lilies,  she  is  so  like  the  stiff, 
sweet  angels  of  Fra  Angelico  or  Perugino,  that  one  al- 
most doubts  when  the  poet  says 

" — her  bosom  must  have  made 
The  bar  she  leaned  on  warm." 

The  imagery  of  the  poem  is  right  out  of  the  picture  world : 

"The  clear  ranged,  unnumbered  heads 
Bowed  with  their  aureoles. " 


The  cPre-%apbaelites.  .  309 

The  imaginations  are  Dantesque : 

"And  the  souls,  mounting  up  to  God, 
Went  by  her  like  thin  flames." 

"The  light  thrilled  towards  her,  filled 
With  angels  in  strong,  level  flight." 

Even  in  "Jenny,"  one  of  the  few  poems  of  Rossetti  that 
deal  with  modern  life,  mediaeval  art  will  creep  in. 

"  Fair  shines  the  gilded  aureole 
In  which  our  highest  painters  place 
Some  living  woman's  simple  face. 
And  the  stilled  features  thus  descried, 
As  Jenny's  long  throat  droops  aside — 
The  shadows  where  the  cheeks  are  thin 
And  pure  wide  curve  from  ear  to  chin — 
With  Raff  ad's,  Leonardo's  hand 
To  show  them  to  men's  souls  might  stand," 

The  type  of  womanly  beauty  here  described  is  character- 
istic; it  is  the  type  familiar  to  all  in  "Pandora,"  "Pros- 
erpine," "La  Ghirlandata,"  "The  Day  Dream,"  "Our 
Lady  of  Pity,"  and  the  other  life-size,  half-length  figure 
paintings  in  oil  which  were  the  masterpieces  of  his  ma- 
turer  style.  The  languid  pose,  the  tragic  eyes  with  their 
mystic,  brooding  intensity  in  contrast  with  the  full  curves 
of  the  lips  and  throat,  give  that  union  of  sensuousness 
and  spirituality  which  is  a  constant  trait  of  Rossetti's 
poetry.  The  Pre-Raphaelites  were  accused  of  exagge- 
rating the  height  of  their  figures.  In  Burne-Jones,  whose 
figures  are  eight  and  a  half  heads  high,  the  exaggeration 
is  deliberate.  In  Morris'  and  Swinburne's  early  poems 
all  the  lines  of  the  female  face  and  figure  are  long — the 
hand,  the  foot,  the  throat,  the  "curve  from  chin  to  ear," 
and  above  all,  the  hair.*     The  hair  in  these  paintings  of 

♦See   especially   Morris'  poem  "Rapunzel"   in  "The  De- 
fence of  Guenevere." 


310  zA  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

Rossetti  seems  a  romantic  exaggeration,  too;  immense, 
crinkly  waves  of  it  spreading  off  to  left  and  right.  Wil- 
liam Morris'  beautiful  wife  is  said  to  have  been  his  model 
in  the  pieces  above  named. 

The  first  collection  of  original  poems  by  Rossetti  was 
published  in  1870.  The  manuscripts  had  been  buried 
with  his  wife  in  1862.  When  he  finally  consented  to 
their  publication,  the  coffin  had  to  be  exhumed  and  the 
manuscripts  removed.  In  1881  a  new  edition  was  issued 
with  changes  and  additions;  and  in  the  same  year  the 
volume  of  "  Ballads  and  Sonnets  "  was  published,  includ- 
ing the  sonnet  sequence  of  "  The  House  of  Life."  Of 
the  poems  in  these  two  collections  which  treat  directly 
of  Dante  the  most  important  is  "  Dante  at  Verona,"  a 
noble  and  sustained  piece  in  eighty-five  stanzas,  slightly 
pragmatic  in  manner,  in  which  are  enwoven  the  legend- 
ary and  historical  incidents  of  Dante's  exile  related  by 
the  early  biographers,  together  with  many  personal  allu- 
sions from  the  "Divine  Comedy."  But  Dante  is  no- 
where very  far  off  either  in  Rossetti 's  painting  or  in  his 
poetry.  In  particular,  the  history  of  Dante's  passion  for 
Beatrice,  as  told  in  the  "  Vita  Nuova,"  in  which  the  figure 
of  the  girl  is  gradually  transfigured  and  idealised  by 
death  into  the  type  of  heavenly  love,  made  an  enduring 
impression  upon  Rossetti's  imagination.  Shelley,  in  his 
"  Epipsychidion,"  had  appealed  to  this  great  love  story, 
so  characteristic  at  once  of  the  mediaeval  mysticism  and 
of  the  Platonic  spirit  of  the  early  Renaissance.  But 
Rossetti  was  the  first  to  give  a  thoroughly  sympathetic 
interpretation  of  it  to  English  readers.  It  became  asso- 
ciated most  intimately  with  his  own  love  and  loss.  We 
see  it  in  a  picture  like  "  Beata  Beatrix,"  and  a  poem  like 


The  Tre-^phaelites.  311 

"The  Portrait,"  written  many  years  before  his  wife's 
death,  but  subsequently  retouched.  Who  can  read  the 
following  stanza  without  thinking  of  Beatrice  and  the 
"Paradiso"? 

"  Even  so,  where  Heaven  holds  breath  and  hears 
The  beating  heart  of  Love's  own  breast, — 
Where  round  the  secret  of  all  spheres 
All  angels  lay  their  wings  to  rest, — 
How  shall  my  soul  stand  rapt  and  awed, 
When,  by  the  new  birth  borne  abroad 
Throughout  the  music  of  the  suns, 
It  enters  in  her  soul  at  once 
And  knows  the  silence  there  for  God  !  " 

Rossetti's  ballads  and  ballad-romances,  all  intensely  - 
mediaeval  in  spirit,  fall,  as  regards  their  manner,  into 
two  very  different  classes.  Pieces  like  "The  Blessed 
Damozel,"  "  The  Bride's  Prelude,"  "  Rose  Mary,"  and 
"The  Staff  and  Scrip"  (from  a  story  in  the  "Gesta 
Romanorum  ")  are  art  poems,  rich,  condensed,  laden  with 
ornament,  pictorial.  Every  attitude  of  every  figure  is  a 
pose ;  landscapes  and  interiors  are  painted  with  minute 
Pre-Raphaelite  finish.  "  The  Bride's  Prelude  "—a  frag- 
ment— opens  with  the  bride's  confession  to  her  sister,  in 
the  'tiring-room  sumptuous  with  gold  and  jewels  and  bro- 
cade, where  the  air  is  heavy  with  musk  and  myrrh,  and 
sultry  with  the  noon.  In  the  pauses  of  her  tale  stray 
lute  notes  creep  in  at  the  casement,  with  noises  from  the 
tennis  court  and  the  splash  of  a  hound  swimming  in  the 
moat.  In  "  Rose  Mary,"  which  employs  the  superstition 
in  the  old  lapidaries  as  to  the  prophetic  powers  of  the 
beryl-stone,  the  colouring  and  imagery  are  equally  opu- 
lent, and,  in  passages,  Oriental. 

On  the  other  hand,  "  Stratton  Water,"  "  Sister  Helen,"   *  , 
"The  White  Ship,"  and  "The  King's  Tragedy  " are  imi^y 


312  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

tations  of  popular  poetry,  done  with  a  simulated  rough- 
ness and  simplicity.  The  first  of  these  adopts  a  common 
ballad  motive,  a  lover's  desertion  of  his  sweetheart 
through  the  contrivances  of  his  wicked  kinsfolk- 

"And  many's  the  good  gift,  Lord  Sands, 
You've  promised  oft  to  me  ; 
But  the  gift  of  yours  I  keep  to-day 
Is  the  babe  in  my  body."  .  .  . 

"Look  down,  look  down,  my  false  mother, 
That  bade  me  not  to  grieve : 
You'  11  look  up  when  our  marriage  fires 
Are  lit  to-morrow  eve. " 

"  Sister  Helen "  is  a  ballad  in  dialogue  with  a  subtly 
varying  repetend,  and  introduces  the  popular  belief  that 
a  witch  could  kill  a  man  slowly  by  melting  a  wax  figure. 
Twice  Rossetti  essayed  the  historical  ballad.  "The 
White  Ship  "  tells  of  the  drowning  of  the  son  and  daugh- 
ter of  Henry  I.  with  their  whole  ship's  company,  except 
one  survivor,  Berold,  the  butcher  of  Rouen,  who  relates 
the  catastrophe.  The  subject  of  "  The  King's  Tragedy  " 
is  the  murder  of  James  I.  by  Robert  Graeme  and  his  men 
in  the  Charterhouse  of  Perth.  The  teller  of  the  tale  is 
Catherine  Douglas,  known  in  Scottish  tradition  as  Kate 
Barlass,  who  had  thrust  her  arm  through  the  staple,  in 
place  of  a  bar,  to  hold  the  door  against  the  assassins. 
A  few  stanzas  of  "  The  Kinges  Quair  "  are  fitted  into  the 
poem  by  shortening  the  lines  two  syllables  each,  to  ac- 
commodate them  to  the  ballad  metre.  It  is  generally 
agreed  that  this  was  a  mistake,  as  was  also  the  introduc- 
tion of  the  "  Beryl  Songs  "  between  the  narrative  parts  of 
"  Rose  Mary."  These  ballads  of  Rossetti  compare  well 
with  other  modern  imitations  of  popular  poetry.  "  Sister 
Helen,"  e.g.,  has  much  greater  dramatic  force  than  Ten- 


The  "Pre-raphaelites.  313 

nyson's  "  Oriana  "  or  "  The  Sisters."  Yet  they  impress 
one,  upon  the  whole,  as  less  characteristic  than  the  poet's 
Italianate  pieces;  as  tours  de Jorce  carefully  pitched  in 
the  key  of  minstrel  song,  but  falsetto  in  effect.  (Com- 
pared with  such  things  as  "  Cadyow  Castle"  or  "Jack 
o'  Hazeldean,"  they  are  felt  to  be  the  work  of  an  art 
poet,  resolute  to  divest  himself  of  fine  language  and 
scrupulously  observant  of  ballad  convention  in  phrase 
and  accent — details  of  which  Scott  was  often  heedless — 
but  devoid  of  that  hearty,  natural  sympathy  with  the  con- 
ditions of  life  from  which  popular  poetry  sprang,  and 
wanting  the  lyrical  pulse  that  beats  in  the  ballad  verse 
of  Scott,  Kingsley,  and  Hogg.  In  "  The  King's  Trag- 
edy" Rossetti  was  poaching  on  Scott's  own  preserves, 
the  territory  of  national  history  and  legend.  If  we  can 
guess  how  Scott  would  have  handled  the  same  story,  we 
shall  have  an  object  lesson  in  two  contrasted  kinds  of 
romanticism.  Scott,  could  not  have  bettered  the  grim 
ferocity  of  the  murder  scene,  nor  have  equalled,  perhaps, 
the  tragic  shadow  of  doom  which  is  thrown  over  Ros- 
setti's  poem  by  the  triple  warning  of  the  weird  woman. 
But  the  sense  of  the  historic  environment,  the  sense  of 
the  actual  in  places  and  persons,  would  have  been  stronger 
in  his  version.)  Graeme's  retreat  would  have  been  the 
Perthshire  Highlands,  and  not  vaguely  "  the  land  of  the 
wild  Scots."  And  if  scenery  had  been  used,  it  would 
not  have  been  such  as  this — a  Pre-Raphaelite  back- 
ground : 

"  That  eve  was  clenched  for  a  boding  storm, 

'  Neath  a  toilsome  moon  half  seen  ; 
The  cloud  stooped  low  and  the  surf  rose  high  ; 
And  where  there  was  a  line  of  the  sky, 

Wild  wings  loomed  dark  between." 


314  «A  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

The  historical  sense  was  weak  in  Rossetti.  It  is  not 
easy  to  imagine  him  composing  a  Waverley  novel.  The 
life  of  the  community,  as  distinct  from  the  life  of  the  in- 
dividual, had  little  interest  for  him.  The  mellifluous 
names  of  his  heroines,  Aloyse,  Rose  Mary,  Blanchelys, 
are  pure  romance.  In  his  intense  concentration  upon 
the  aesthetic  aspects  of  every  subject,  Rossetti  seemed,  to 
those  who  came  in  contact  with  him,  singularly  borne. 
He  was  indifferent  to  politics,  society,  speculative 
thought,  and  the  discoveries  of  modern  science — to  con- 
temporary matters  in  general.*  It  is  to  this  narrow  aes- 
theticism  that  Mr.  Courthope  refers  when,  in  comparing 
Coleridge  and  Keats  with  Rossetti  and  Swinburne,  he 
finds  in  the  latter  an  "  extraordinary  skill  in  the  imita- 
tion of  antique  forms,"  but  "less  liberty  of  imagina- 
tion." f  The  contrast  is  most  striking  in  the  case  of  Cole- 
ridge, whose  intellectual  interests  had  so  wide  a  range. 
Rossetti  cared  only  for  Coleridge's  verse;  William  Mor- 
ris spoke  with  contempt  of  everything  that  he  had  written 
except  two  or  three  of  his  poems;  %    and  Swinburne  re- 

*"I  can't  say,"  wrote  William  Morris,  "how  it  was  that 
Rossetti  took  no  interest  in  politics  ;  but  so  it  was  :  of  course 
he  was  quite  Italian  in  his  general  turn  of  thought ;  though  I 
think  he  took  less  interest  in  Italian  politics  than  in  English. 
.  .  .  The  truth  is,  he  cared  for  nothing  but  individual  and  per- 
sonal matters  ;  chiefly  of  course  in  relation  to  art  and  litera- 
ture. " 

f'The  Liberal  Movement  in  English  Literature,"  by  W.  J. 
Courthope,  London,  1885,  p.  230. 

i "  Keats  was  a  great  poet  who  sometimes  nodded.  .  .  . 
Coleridge  was  a  muddle-brained  metaphysician  who,  by  some 
strange  freak  of  fortune,  turned  out  a  few  real  poems  amongst 
the  dreary  flood  of  inanity  which  was  his  wont.  ...  I  have 
been  through  the  poems,  and  find  that  the  only  ones  which 
have  any  interest  for  me  are :  (1)  '  Ancient  Mariner ' ;  (2) 
'  Christabel '  ;  (3)  ■  Kubla  Khan '  ;  and  (4)  the  poem  called 
'Love'  "  (Mackail's  "Life  of  Morris,"  vol.  ii.,  p.  310). 


The  cPre-%aphaelites.  315 

gretted  that  he  had  lost  himself  in  the  mazes  of  theology 
and  philosophy,  instead  of  devoting  himself  wholly  to 
creative  work.  Keats,  it  is  true,  was  exclusively  pre- 
occupied with  the  beautiful;  but  he  was  more  eclectic 
than  Rossetti — perhaps  also  than  Morris,  though  hardly 
than  Swinburne.  The  world  of  classic  fable,  the  world 
of  outward  nature  were  as  dear  to  his  imagination  as  the 
country  of  romance.  Rossetti  was  not  university  bred, 
and,  as  we  have  seen,  forgot  his  Greek  early.  Morris, 
like  Swinburne,  was  an  Oxford  man;  yet  we  hear  him 
saying  that  he  "  loathes  all  classical  art  and  literature."  * 
In  "The  Life  and  Death  of  Jason"  and  "The  Earthly 
Paradise  "  he  treats  classical  and  mediaeval  subjects  im- 
partially, but  treats  them  both  alike  in  mediaeval  fashion; 
as  Chaucer  does,  in  "The  Knightes  Tale."f  As  for 
Rossetti,  he  is  never  classical.  He  makes  Pre-Raphael- 
ite ballads  out  of  the  tale  of  Troy  divine  and  the  Rab- 
binical legends  of  Adam's  first  wife,  Lilith;  ballads  with 
quaint  burdens — 

"  (O  Troy's  down, 
Tall  Troy's  on  fire)"; 

"  (Sing  Eden  Bower ! 
Alas  the  hour !) " 

and  whose  very  titles  have  an  Old  English  familiarity — 
"Eden  Bower,"  "Troy  Town,"  as  who  says  "London 
Bridge,"  "  Edinboro'  Town,"  etc.  Swinburne  has  given 
the  rationale  of  this  type  of  art  in  his  description  of  a 
Bacchus  and  Ariadne  by  Lippino  Lippi  ("  Old  Masters 

*"The  Life  of  William  Morris,"  by  W.  J.  Mackail,  London, 
1899,  vol.  ii.,  p.  171. 

f  For  the  Chaucerian  manipulation  of  classical  subjects  by 
Pre-Raphaelite  artists  see  "Edward  Burn e- Jones, "  by  Mal- 
colm Bell,  London,  1899. 


31 6  <iA  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

at  Florence"),  "an  older  legend  translated  and  trans- 
formed into  mediaeval  shape.  More  than  any  others, 
these  painters  of  the  early  Florentine  school  reproduce 
in  their  own  art  the  style  of  thought  and  work  familiar 
to  a  student  of  Chaucer  and  his  fellows  or  pupils. 
Nymphs  have  faded  into  fairies,  and  gods  subsided  into 
men.  A  curious  realism  has  grown  up  out  of  that  very 
ignorance  and  perversion  which  seemed  as  if  it  could  not 
but  falsify  whatever  thing  it  touched  upon.  This  study 
of  Fillippino's  has  all  the  singular  charm  of  the  romantic 
school.  .  .  .  The  clear  form  has  gone,  the  old  beauty 
dropped  out  of  sight  .  .  .  but  the  mediaeval  or  romantic 
form  has  an  incommunicable  charm  of  its  own.  .  .  .  Be- 
fore Chaucer  could  give  us  a  Pandarus  or  a  Cressida,  all 
knowledge  and  memory  of  the  son  of  Lycaon  and  the 
daughter  of  Chryses  must  have  died  out,  the  whole  poem 
collapsed  into  romance;  but  far  as  these  maybe  removed 
from  the  true  tale  and  the  true  city  of  Troy,  they  are  not 
phantoms." 

But  of  all  this  group,  the  one  most  thoroughly  steeped 
in  mediaeval  ism — to  repeat  his  own  description  of  him- 
self—was William  Morris.  He  was  the  English  equiva- 
lent of  Gautier's  homme  moyen  dge ;  and  it  was  his  en- 
deavour, in  letters  and  art,  to  pick  up  and  continue  the 
mediaeval  tradition,  interrupted  by  four  hundred  years  of 
modern  civilisation.  The  sixteenth  and  seventeenth 
centuries  did  not  attract  him ;  and  as  for  the  eighteenth, 
it  simply  did  not  exist  for  him.*     The  ugliness  of  mod- 

*"The  slough  of  despond  which  we  call  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury" ("Hopes  and  Fears  for  Art,"  p.  211).  "The  English 
language,  which  under  the  hands  of  sycophantic  verse-makers 
had  been  reduced  to  a  miserable  jargon  .  .  .  flowed  clear, 
pure,  and  simple  along  with  the  music  of  Blake  and  Coleridge. 


The  "Pre-raphaelites.  317 

ern  life,  with  its  factories  and  railroads,  its  unpicturesque 
poverty  and  selfish  commercialism,  was  hateful  to  him  as 
it  was  to  Ruskin — his  teacher.  He  loved  to  imagine  the 
face  of  England  as  it  was  in  the  time  of  Chaucer — his 
master;  to 

"  Forget  six  counties  overhung  with  smoke. 
Forget  the  snorting  steam  and  piston  smoke,  .  .  . 
And  dream  of  London,  small  and  white  and  clean, 
The  clear  Thames  bordered  by  its  gardens  green." 

The  socialistic  Utopia  depicted  in  his  "  News  from  No- 
where" (1890)  is  a  regenerated  Middle  Age,  without 
feudalism,  monarchy,  and  the  mediaeval  Church,  but  also 
without  densely  populated  cities,  with  handicrafts  sub- 
stituted for  manufactures,  and  with  mediaeval  architecture, 
house  decoration,  and  costume.  None  of  Morris'  books 
deals  with  modern  life,  but  all  of  them  with  an  imagi- 
nary future  or  an  almost  equally  imaginary  past.  This 
same  "  News  from  Nowhere  "  contains  a  passage  of  dia- 
logue in  justification  of  retrospective  romance.  "*How 
is  it  that  though  we  are  so  interested  with  our  life  for  the 
most  part,  yet  when  people  take  to  writing  poems  or 
painting  pictures  they  seldom  deal  with  our  modern  life, 
or  if  they  do,  take  good  care  to  make  their  poems  or  pic- 
tures unlike  that  life?  Are  we  not  good  enough  to  paint 
ourselves  ?'...'  It  always  was  so,  and  I  suppose  al- 
ways will  be,'  said  he,  '  however,  it  may  be  explained. 
It  is  true  that  in  the  nineteenth  century,  when  there  was 
so  little  art  and  so  much  talk  about  it,  there  was  a  theory 
that  art  and  imaginative  literature  ought  to  deal  with 

Take  those  names,  the  earliest  in  date  among  ourselves,  as  a 
type  of  the  change  that  has  happened  in  literature  since  the 
time  of  George  II."   {ibid.,  p.  82). 


318  *A  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

contemporary  life;  but  they  never  did  so;  for,  if  there 
was  any  pretence  of  it,  the  author  always  took  care  .  .  . 
to  disguise,  or  exaggerate,  or  idealise,  and  in  some  way 
or  another  make  it  strange ;  so  that,  for  all  the  verisimil- 
itude there  was,  he  might  just  as  well  have  dealt  with  the 
times  of  the  Pharaohs.'  "  * 

/  The  difference  between  the  mediaevalism  of  Rossetti 
/  and  of  Morris  illustrates,  in  an  interesting  way,  the  varied 
/  results  produced  by  the  operation  of  similar  influences 
on  contrasted  temperaments.  The  comparison  which 
Morris*  biographer  makes  between  him  and  Burne- Jones 
holds  true  as  between  Morris  and  Rossetti :  "  They  re- 
ceived or  re-incarnated  the  Middle  Ages  through  the 
eyes  and  brain,  in  the  one  case  of  a  Norman,  in  the  other 
of  a  Florentine."  Morris  was  twice  a  Norman,  in  his 
love  for  the  romancers  and  Gothic  builders  of  northern 
France;  and  in  his  enthusiasm  for  the  Icelandic  sagas. 
His  visits  to  Italy  left  him  cold,  and  he  confessed  to  a 
strong  preference  for  the  art  of  the  North.  "  With  the 
later  work  of  Southern  Europe  I  am  quite  out  of  sym- 
pathy. In  spite  of  its  magnificent  power  and  energy,  I  feel 
it  as  an  enemy ;  and  this  much  more  in  Italy,  where  there 
is  such  a  mass  of  it,  than  elsewhere.  Yes,  and  even  in 
these  magnificent  and  wonderful  towns  I  long  rather  for 
the  heap  of  gray  stones  with  a  gray  roof  that  we  call  a 
house  north-away."  Rossetti's  Italian  subtlety  and  mys- 
ticism are  replaced  in  Morris  by  an  English  homeliness 
— a  materialism  which  is  Teutonic  and  not  Latin  or 
Celtic,  and  one  surface  indication  of  which  is  the  scru- 
pulously Saxon  vocabulary  of  his  poems  and  prose  ro- 
mances. "  His  earliest  enthusiasms,"  said  Jurne-Jones, 
*Page  113. 


The  cPre-4l$aphaelites.  319 

"  were  his  latest.  The  thirteenth  century  was  his  ideal 
period  always  " — the  century  which  produced  the  lovely 
French  romances  which  he  translated  and  the  great 
French  cathedrals  which  he  admired  above  all  other 
architecture  on  earth.  But  this  admiration  was  aesthetic 
rather  than  religious.  The  Catholic  note,  so  resonant  in 
Rossetti's  poetry,  is  hardly  audible  in  Morris,  at  least 
after  his  early  Oxford  days.  The  influence  of  Newman 
still  lingered  at  Oxford  in  the  fifties,  though  the  Trac- 
tarian  movement  had  spent  its  force  and  a  reaction  had 
set  in.  Morris  came  up  to  the  university  an  Anglo- 
Catholic,  and  like  his  fellow-student  and  life-long  friend, 
Burne-Jones,  had  been  destined  to  holy  orders.  We  find 
them  both,  as  undergraduates,  eagerly  reading  the  "  Acta 
Sanctorum,"  the  "Tracts  for  the  Times,"  and  Kenelm 
Digby's  "Mores  Catholici,"  and  projecting  a  kind  of 
monastic  community,  where  celibacy  should  be  practised 
and  sacred  art  cultivated.  But  later  impressions  soon 
crowded  out  this  early  religious  fervour.  Churchly  ascet- 
icism and  the  mediaeval  "  praise  of  virginity  "  made  no 
part  of  Morris'  social  ideal.  The  body  counted  for  much 
with  him.  In  "  News  from  Nowhere,"  marriage  even  is 
so  far  from  being  a  sacrament,  that  it  is  merely  a  free 
arrangement  terminable  at  the  will  of  either  party. 
Morris  had  a  passionate  love  of  earth  and  a  regard  for 
the  natural  instincts.  He  complains  that  Swinburne's 
poetry  is  "founded  on  literature,  not  on  nature."  His 
religion  is  a  reversion  to  the  old  Teutonic  pagan  earth- 
worship,  and  he  had  the  pagan  dread  of  "  quick-coming 
death."  His  paradise  is  an  "  Earthly  Paradise  " ;  it  is 
in  search  of  earthly  immortality  that  his  voyagers  set  sail. 
"  Of  heaven  or  hell,"  says  his  prelude,  "  I  have  no  power 


32 o  zA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

to  sing  " ;  and  the  great  mediaeval  singer  of  heaven  and 
hell  who  meant  so  much  to  Rossetti,  appealed  hardly 
more  to  Morris  than  to  Walter  Scott. 

Moreover,  Morris'  work  in  verse  was  the  precise  equiv- 
alent of  his  work  as  a  decorative  artist,  who  cared  little 
for  easel  pictures,  and  regarded  painting  as  one  method 
out  of  many  for  covering  wall  spaces  or  other  surfaces.* 
His  poetry  is  mainly  narrative,  but  whether  epical  or 
lyrical  in  form,  is  always  less  lyric  in  essence  than  Ros- 
setti's. In  its  objective  spirit  and  even  distribution  of 
emphasis,  it  contrasts  with  Rossetti's  expressional  in- 
tensity very  much  as  Morris'  wall-paper  and  tapestry  de- 
signs contrast  with  paintings  like  "  Beata  Beatrix  "  and 
"  Proserpina."  Morris — as  an  artist — cared  more  for 
places  and  things  than  for  people ;  and  his  interest  was 
in  the  work  of  art  itself,  not  in  the  personality  of  the 
artist. 

(Quite  unlike  as  was  Morris  to  Scott  in  temper  and 
mental  endowment,  his  position  in  the  romantic  litera- 
ture of  the  second  half-century  answers  very  closely  to 
Scott's  in  the  first.  His  work  resembled  Scott's  in  vol- 
ume, and  in  its  easiness  for  the  general  reader.  For  the 
second  time  he  made  the  Middle  Ages  popular.  There 
was  nothing  esoteric  in  his  art,  as  in  Rossetti's.     It  was 


*  "  Sir  Edward  Burne-Jones  told  me  that  Morris  would  have 
liked  the  faces  in  his  pictures  less  highly  finished,  and  less 
charged  with  the  concentrated  meaning  or  emotion  of  the 
painting  .  .  .  and  he  thought  that  the  dramatic  and  emo- 
tional interest  of  a  picture  ought  to  be  diffused  throughout  it 
as  equally  as  possible.  Such,  too,  was  his  own  practice  in  the 
cognate  art  of  poetry  ;  and  this  is  one  reason  why  his  poetry 
affords  so  few  memorable  single  lines,  and  lends  itself  so  little 
to  quotation"  (Mackail's  "Life  of  William  Morris,"  vol.  ii., 
p.  272). 


The  "Pre-raphaelites.  321 

English  and  came  home  to  Englishmen.  His  poetry, 
like  his  decorative  work,  was  meant  for  the  people,  and 
"  understanded  of  the  people."  Moreover,  like  Scott,  he 
was  an  accomplished  raconteur,  and  a  story  well  told  is 
always  sure  of  an  audience.)  His  first  volume,  "The 
Defence  of  Guenevere"  (1858),  dedicated  to  Rossetti 
and  inspired  by  him,  had  little  popular  success.  But 
when,  like  Millais,  he  abandoned  the  narrowly  Pre- 
Raphaelite  manner  and  broadened  out,  in  "The  Life 
and  Death  of  Jason  "  (1867)  and  "  The  Earthly  Paradise  " 
(1868-70),  into  a  fashion  of  narrative  less  caviare  to  the 
general,  the  public  response  was  such  as  met  Millais. 

Morris'  share  in  the  Pre-Raphaelite  movement  was  in 
the  special  field  of  decorative  art.  His  enthusiasm  for 
Gothic  architecture  had  been  aroused  at  Oxford  by  a 
reading  of  Ruskin's  chapter  on  "  The  Nature  of  Gothic  " 
in  "The  Stones  of  Venice."  In  1856,  acting  upon  this 
impulse,  he  articled  himself  to  the  Oxford  architect  G. 
E.  Street,  and  began  work  in  his  office.  He  did  not 
persevere  in  the  practice  of  the  profession,  and  never 
built  a  house.  But  he  became  and  remained  a  connois- 
seur of  Gothic  architecture  and  an  active  member  of  the 
Society  for  the  Protection  of  Ancient  Buildings.  His 
numerous  visits  to  Amiens,  Chartres,  Reims,  Soissons, 
and  Rouen  were  so  many  pilgrimages  to  the  shrines  of 
mediaeval  art.  Indeed,  he  always  regarded  the  various 
branches  of  house  decoration  as  contributory  to  the  mas- 
ter art,  architecture. 

A  little  later,  under  the  dominating  and  somewhat 
overbearing  persuasions  of  Rossetti,  he  tried  his  hand  at 
painting,  but  never  succeeded  well  in  drawing  the  human 
face   and   figure.     The   figure   designs   for   his  stained 


322  tA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

glass,  tapestries,  etc.,  were  usually  made  by  Burne-Jones, 
Morris  furnishing  floriated  patterns  and  the  like.  In 
1 86 1  was  formed  the  firm  of  Morris  &  Company,  which 
revolutionised  English  household  decoration.  Rossetti 
and  Burne-Jones  were  among  the  partners  in  this  con- 
cern, which  undertook  to  supply  the  public  with  high  art 
work  in  wall  painting,  paper  hangings,  embroidery,  car- 
pets, tapestries,  printed  cottons,  stamped  leather,  carved 
furniture,  tiles,  metals,  jewelry,  etc.  In  particular,  Mor- 
ris revived  the  mediaeval  arts  of  glass-staining,  illumi- 
nation, or  miniature  painting,  and  tapestry -weaving  with 
the  high-warp  loom.  Though  he  chose  to  describe  him- 
self as  a  "  dreamer  of  dreams  born  out  of  my  due  time," 
and  "  the  idle  singer  of  an  empty  day,"  he  was  a  tireless 
practical  workman  of  astonishing  cleverness  and  versa- 
tility. He  taught  himself  to  dye  and  weave.  When,  in 
the  last  decade  of  the  century,  he  set  up  the  famous 
Kelmscott  Press,  devoted  to  artistic  printing  and  book- 
making,  he  studied  the  processes  of  type-casting  and 
paper  manufacture,  and  actually  made  a  number  of  sheets 
of  paper  with  his  own  hands.  It  was  his  favourite  idea 
that  the  division  of  labour  in  modern  manufactures  had 
degraded  the  workman  by  making  him  a  mere  machine; 
that  the  divorce  between  the  art  of  the  designer  and  the 
art  of  the  handicraftsman  was  fatal  to  both.  To  him  the 
Middle  Ages  meant,  not  the  ages  of  faith,  or  of  chivalry, 
or  of  bold  and  free  adventure,  but  of  popular  art — of 
"  The  Lesser  Arts  " ;  when  every  artisan  was  an  artist  of 
the  beautiful  and  took  pleasure  in  the  thing  which  his 
hand  shaped;  when  not  only  the  cathedral  and  the  cas- 
tle, but  the  townsman's  dwelling-house  and  the  labourer's 
cottage  was  a  thing  of  beauty.     He   believed  that   in 


The  cPresRaphaelites.  323 

those  times  there  was,  as  there  should  be  again,  an  art 
by  the  people  and  for  the  people.  It  was  the  democratic 
and  not  the  aristocratic  elements  of  mediaeval  life  that 
he  praised.  "  From  the  first  dawn  of  history  till  quite 
modern  times,  art,  which  nature  meant  to  solace  all,  ful- 
filled its  purpose;  all  men  shared  in  it;  that  was  what 
made  life  romantic,  as  people  call  it,  in  those  days;  that 
and  not  robber-barons  and  inaccessible  kings  with  their 
hierarchy  of  serving-nobles  and  other  such  rubbish."  * 
/One  more  passage  will  serve  to  set  in  sharp  contrast  the 
romanticism  of  Scott  and  the  romanticism  of  Ruskin  and 
Morris.  "With  that  literature  in  which  romance,  that  is 
to  say  humanity,  was  re-born,  there  sprang  up  also  a  feel- 
ing for  the  romance  of  external  nature,  which  is  surely 
strong  in  us  now,  joined  with  a  longing  to  know  some- 
thing real  of  the  lives  of  those  who  have  gone  before  us ; 
of  these  feelings  united  you  will  find  the  broadest  ex- 
pression in  the  pages  of  Walter  Scott;  it  is  curious,  as 
showing  how  sometimes  one  art  will  lag  behind  another 
in  a  revival,  that  the  man  who  wrote  the  exquisite  and 
wholly  unfettered  naturalism  of  *  The  Heart  of  Midlo- 
thian,' for  instance,  thought  himself  continually  bound  to 
seem  to  feel  ashamed  of,  and  to  excuse  himself  for,  his 
love  of  Gothic  architecture ;  he  felt  that  it  was  romantic, 
and  he  knew  that  it  gave  him  pleasure,  but  somehow  he 
had  not  found  out  that  it  was  art,  having  been  taught  in 
many  ways  that  nothing  could  be  art  that  was  not  done 
by  a  named  man  under  academical  rules."  f) 

It  is  worth  while  to  glance  at  Morris'  culture-history 
and  note  the  organic  filaments  which  connect  the  later 

*  "  Hopes  and  Fears  for  Art, "  p.  79. 
f /*&£,>  83. 

"''NOFTHE 


324  *A  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

with  the  earlier  romanticism.  He  had  read  the  Waverley 
novels  as  a  child,  and  had  even  snatched  a  fearful  joy 
from  Clara  Reeve's  "  Old  English  Baron."  *  He  knew 
his  Tennyson  before  he  went  up  to  Oxford,  but  reserved 
an  unqualified  admiration  only  for  such  things  as 
"  Oriana  "  and  "  The  Lady  of  Shalott."  He  was  greatly 
excited  by  the  woodcut  engraving  of  Diirer's  "  Knight, 
Death  and  the  Devil "  in  an  English  translation  of 
Fouque's  "  Sintram."  f  Rossetti  was  first  made  known 
to  him  by  Ruskin's  Edinburgh  lectures  of  1854  and  by 
the  illustration  to  Allingham's  "  Maids  of  Elfin  Mere," 
over  which  Morris  and  Burne-Jones  "  pored  continually." 
Morris  devoured  greedily  all  manner  of  mediaeval  chroni- 
cles and  romances,  French  and  English;  but  he  read 
little  in  Elizabethan  and  later  authors.  He  disliked 
Milton  and  Wordsworth,  and  held  Keats  to  be  the  fore- 
most of  modern  English  poets.  He  took  no  interest  in 
mythology,  or  Welsh  poetry  or  Celtic  literature  gener- 
ally, with  the  exception  of  the  "  Morte  Darthur,"  which, 
Rossetti  assured  him,  was  second  only  to  the  Bible.  The 
Border  ballads  had  been  his  delight  since  childhood. 
An  edition  of  these;  a  selection  of  English  mediaeval 
lyrics;  and  a  "Morte  Darthur,"  with  a  hundred  illustra- 
tions from  designs  by  Burne-Jones,  were  among  the  un- 
fulfilled purposes  of  the  Kelmscott  Press. 

Morris'  first  volume,  "  The  Defence  of  Guenevere  and 
Other  Poems,"  was  put  forth  in  1858  (reprint  in  1875)  J 
"  a  book,"  says  Saintsbury,  "  almost  as  much  the  herald 
or  the  second  school  of  Victorian  poetry  as  Tennyson's 
early  work  was  of  the  first."  J     "  Many  of  the  poems," 

*See  vol.  i.,  pp.  241-43.  f  Vide  supra,  p.  152. 

$"A  Short  History  of  English  Literature,"  p.  783. 


The  Vre-CRaphaelites.  325 

wrote  William  Bell  Scott,  "represent  the  mediaeval  spirit 
in  a  new  way,  not  by  a  sentimental,  nineteenth-century- 
revival  mediaevalism,  but  they  give  a  poeTiCal  sehs"6"<5f  a 
barbaric  age  strongly  and  sharply  real."  *  These  last 
words  point  at  Tennyson.  The  first  four  pieces  in  the 
volume  are  on  Arthurian  subjects,  but  are  wholly  differ- 
ent in  style  and  conception  even  from  such  poems  as 
"  The  Lady  of  Shalott "  and  "  Sir  Lancelot  and  Queen 
Guinevere."  They  are  more  mannerised,  more  in  the 
spirit  of  Pre-Raphaelite  art,  than  anything  in  Morris' 
later  work.  If  the  name-poem  is  put  beside  Tennyson's 
idyl  "  Guinevere  " ;  or  "  Sir  Galahad,  a  Christmas  Mys- 
tery," beside  Tennyson's  "  Sir  Galahad,"  the  difference 
is  striking.  In  place  of  the  refined  ethics  and  senti- 
ment, and  purely  modern  spiritual  ideals  which  find  a 
somewhat  rhetorical  expression  in  Tennyson,  Morris  en- 
deavours to  render  the  genuine  Catholic  mediaeval  ma- 
terialistic religious  temper  as  it  appears  in  Malory; 
where  unquestioning  belief,  devotion,  childish  supersti- 
tion, and  the  fear  of  hell  coexist  with  fleshly  love  and 
hate — a  passion  of  sin  and  a  passion  of  repentance. 
Guenevere's  "defence"  is,  at  bottom,  the  same  as 
Phryne's : 

"See  through  my  long  throat  how  the  words  go  up 
In  ripples  to  my  mouth ;  how  in  my  hand 
The  shadow  lies  like  wine  within  a  cup 
Of  marvellously  colour' d  gold." 

"  Dost  thou  reck 
That  I  am  beautiful.  Lord,  even  as  you 
And  your  dear  mother?  "  f 

Morris    criticised  Tennyson's     Galahad,  as  "rather  a 

♦"Recollections  of  Rossetti,"  vol.  ii.,  p.  42. 
I  "King  Arthur's  Tomb." 


J, 


326  <>A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

mild  youth."  His  own  Galahad  is  not  the  rapt  seer  of 
the  vision  beatific,  but  a  more  flesh-and-blood  character, 
who  sometimes  has  cold  fits  in  which  he  doubts  whether 
the  quest  is  not  a  fool's  errand;  and  whether  even  Sir 
Palomydes  in  his  unrequited  love,  and  Sir  Lancelot  in 
his  guilty  love,  do  not  take  greater  comfort  than  he. 

Other  poems  in  the  book  were  inspired  by  Froissart's 
"  Chronicle "  or  other  histories  of  the  English  wars  in 
France:  "Sir  Peter  Harpdon's  End,"  "Concerning  Gef- 
fray  Teste  Noire,"  "The  Eve  of  Crecy,"  etc.*  Still 
others,  and  these  not  the  least  fascinating,  were  things  of 
pure  invention,  lays  of  "  a  country  lit  with  lunar  rainbows 
and  ringing  with  fairy  song."  f  These  have  been  thought 
to  owe  something  to  Edgar  Poe;  but  they  much  more 
nearly  resemble  the  work  of  the  latest  symbolistic 
schools.  When  reading  such  poems  as  "Rapunzel," 
"Golden  Wings,"  and  "The  Tune  of  Seven  Towers," 
one  is  frequently  reminded  of  "  Serres  Chaudes"  or  "  Pel- 
teas  et  Mdlisande  " ;  and  is  at  no  loss  to  understand  why 
Morris  excepted  Maeterlinck  from  his  general  indiffer- 
ence to  contemporary  writers — Maeterlinck,  like  himself, 
a  student  of  Rossetti.  There  is  no  other  collection  of 
English  poems  so  saturated  with  Pre-Raphaelitism.  The 
flowers  are  all  orchids,  strange  in  shape,  violent  in  col- 
ouring. Rapunzel,  e.g.,  is  like  one  of  Maeterlinck's 
spellbound  princesses.  She  stands  at  the  top  of  her 
tower,  letting  down  her  hair  to  the  ground,  and  her  lover 
climbs  up  to  her  by  it  as  by  a  golden  stair.  Here  is 
again  the  singular  Pre-Raphaelite  and  symbolistic  scen- 

*One  of  these,  "The  Haystack  in  the  Floods,"  has  a  tragic 
power  unexcelled  by  any  later  work  of  Morris, 
f  Saintsbury,  p.  785. 


The  "Pre-raphaelites.  327 

ery,  with  its  images  from  art  and  not  from  nature.  Tall 
damozels  in  white  and  scarlet  walk  in  garths  of  lily  and 
sunflower,  or  under  apple  boughs,  and  feed  the  swans  in 
the  moat. 

"  Moreover,  she  held  scarlet  lilies,  such 
As  Maiden  Margaret  bears  upon  the  light 
Of  the  great  church  walls."  * 

"  Lord,  give  Mary  a  dear  kiss, 

And  let  gold  Michael,  who  look'd  down, 
When  I  was  there,  on  Rouen  town, 
From  the  spire,  bring  me  that  kiss 
On  a  lily  !  "  f 

The  language  is  as  artfully  quaint  as  the  imaginations 
are  fantastic : 

"  Between  the  trees  a  large  moon,  the  wind  lows 
Not  loud,  but  as  a  cow  begins  to  low." % 

"Pale  in  the  green  sky  were  the  stars,  I  ween, 
Because  the  moon  shone  like  a  star  she  shed 
When  she  dwelt  up  in  heaven  a  while  ago, 
And  ruled  all  things  but  God."  § 

"  Quiet  groans 
That  swell  out  the  little  bones 
Of  my  bosom."  J 

"  I  sit  on  a  purple  bed, 
Outside,  the  wall  is  red, 
Thereby  the  apple  hangs, 
And  the  wasp,  caught  by  the  fangs, 
Dies  in  the  autumn  night. 
And  the  bat  flits  till  light, 
And  the  love-crazed  knight 
Kisses  the  long,  wet  grass. "  % 

A  number  of  these  pieces  are  dramatic  in  form,  mono- 
logues or  dialogues,   sometimes   in   the  manner  of  the 

* ' '  King  Arthur '  s  Tomb. "  +  "  Rapunzel. " 

\  "  King  Arthur '  s  Tomb. "  §  Ibid. 

\ "  Rapunzel. "  1 "  Golden  Wings. " 


328  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

mediaeval  mystery  plays.*  Others  are  ballads,  not  of  the 
popular  variety,  but  after  Rossetti's  fashion,  employing 
burdens,  English  or  French : 

"Two  red  roses  across  the  moon  "  ; 

11  Hah !  hah  !  la  belle  jaune  giroflee  "  ; 

"Ah  !  qu'elle  est  belle  La  Marguerite  "  ;  etc. 

The  only  poem  in  the  collection  which  imitates  the  style 
of  the  old  minstrel  ballad  is  "  Welland  Water."  The 
name-poem  is  in  terza  rima ;  the  longest,  "  Sir  Peter 
Harpdon's  End,"  in  blank  verse;  "Golden  Wings,"  in 
the  "  In  Memoriam  "  stanza. 

When  Morris  again  came  before  the  public  as  a  poet, 
his  style  had  undergone  a  change  akin  to  that  which 
transformed  the  Pre-Raphaelite  painter  into  the  decora- 
tive artist.  The  skeins  of  vivid  romantic  colour  had  run 
out  into  large-pattern  tapestries.  There  was  nothing 
eccentric  or  knotty  about  "  The  Life  and  Death  of  Jason  " 
and  "  The  Earthly  Paradise."  On  the  contrary,  nothing 
so  facile,  pellucid,  pleasant  to  read  had  appeared  in 
modern  literature — a  poetic  lubberland,  a  "clear,  un- 
wrinkled  song."  The  reader  was  carried  along  with  no 
effort  and  little  thought  on  the  long  swell  of  the  verse, 
his  ear  lulled  by  the  musical  lapse  of  the  rime,  his  eye 
soothed — not  excited — by  ever-unrolling  panoramas  of 
an  enchanted  country  "  east  of  the  sun  and  west  of  the 
moon."  Morris  wrote  with  incredible  ease  and  rapidity. 
It  was  a  maxim  with  him,  as  with  Ruskin,  that  all  good 
work  is  done  easily  and  with  pleasure  to  the  workman; 
and  certainly  that  seems  true  of  him  which  Lowell  said 
of  Chaucer — that  he  never  "  puckered  his  brow  over  an 

*  See  "Sir  Galahad,"  "The  Chapel  in  Lyoness,""A  Good 
Knight  in  Prison. " 


The  Tre-'Ttyphaelites.  329 

unmanageable  verse."  Chaucer  was  his  avowed  master,* 
and  perhaps  no  English  narrative  poet  has  come  so  near 
to  Chaucer.  [Like  Chaucer,  and  unlike  Scott,  he  did  not 
invent  stories,  but  told  the  old  stories  over  again  with  a 
new  charm.  His  poetry,  as  such,  is  commonly  better 
than  Scott's ;  lacking  the  fire  and  nervous  energy  of  Scott 
in  his  great  passages,  but  sustained  at  a  higher  artistic 
level.  He  had  the  copious  vein  of  the  mediaeval  chron- 
iclers and  romancers,  without  their  tiresome  prolixity 
and  with  finer  resources  of  invention.  He  had  none  of 
Chaucer's  humour,  realism,  or  skill  in  character  sketch- 
ing. In  its  final  impression  his  poetry  resembles  Spenser's 
more  than  Chaucer's.  Like  Spenser's,  it  grows  monot- 
onous— without  quite  growing  languid — from  the  steady 
flow  of  the  metre  and  the  exhaustless  profusion  of  the 
imagery.  The  reader  becomes,  somewhat  ungratefully, 
surfeited  with  beauty,  and  seeks  relief  in  poetry  more 
passionate  or  intellectual.  Chaucer  and,  in  a  degree, 
Walter  Scott,  have  a  way  of  making  old  things  seem  near 
to  usj  In  Spenser  and  Morris,  though  bright  and  clear 
in  all  imagined  details,  they  stand  at  an  infinite  remove, 
in  a  world  apart — 

" — a  little  isle  of  bliss 
Midmost  the  beating  of  the  steely  sea  " 

which  typifies  the  weary  problems  and  turmoil  of  con- 
temporary life. 

"  Jason  "  was  a  poem  of  epic  dimensions,  on  the  win- 
ning of  the  Golden  Fleece;  "The  Earthly  Paradise,"  a 
series  of  twenty-four  narrative  poems  set  in  a  framework 
of  the  poet's  own.     Certain  gentlemen  of  Norway,  in  the 

*See  "Jason,"  Book  xvii.,  5-24,  and  the  Envoi  to  "The 
Earthly  Paradise." 


3$o  zA  History  of  English  ^manticism. 

reign  of  Edward  III.  of  England,  set  out — like  St.  Bran- 
dan — on  a  voyage  in  search  of  a  land  that  is  free  from 
death.  They  cross  the  Western  ocean,  and  after  long 
years  of  wandering,  come,  disappointed  of  their  hope,  to 
a  city  founded  centuries  since  by  exiles  from  ancient 
Greece.  There  being  hospitably  received,  hosts  and 
guests  interchange  tales  in  every  month  of  the  year ;  a 
classical  story  alternating  with  a  mediaeval  one,  till  the 
double  sum  of  twelve  is  complete.  Among  the  wanderers 
are  a  Breton  and  a  Suabian,  so  that  the  mediaeval  tales 
have  a  wide  range.  There  are  Norse  stories  like  "  The 
Lovers  of  Gudrun";  French  Charlemagne  romances, 
like  "  Ogier  the  Dane  " ;  and  late  German  legends  of  the 
fourteenth  century,  like  "  The  Hill  of  Venus,"  besides 
miscellaneous  travelled  fictions  of  the  Middle  Age.* 
But  the  Hellenic  legends  are  reduced  to  a  common  term 
with  the  romance  material,  so  that  the  reader  is  not  very 
sensible  of  a  difference.  Many  of  them  are  selected  for 
their  marvellous  character,  and  abound  in  dragons,  mon- 
sters, transformations,  and  enchantments:  "The  Golden 
Apples,"  " Bellerophon,"  "Cupid  and  Psyche,"  "The 
Story  of  Perseus,"  etc.  Even  "  Jason "  is  treated  as  a 
romance.  Of  its  seventeen  books,  all  but  the  last  are 
devoted  to  the  exploits  and  wanderings  of  the  Argonauts. 

*Some  of  Morris'  sources  were  William  of  Malmesbury, 
"Mandeville's  Travels,"  the  "Gesta  Romanorum, "  and  the 
'* Golden  Legend."  "The  Man  Born  to  be  King  "  was  derived 
from  "The  Tale  of  King  Constans,  the  Emperor  "  in  a  volume 
of  French  romances  ("Nouvelles  francaises  en  prose  du 
xiii.ieme  Siecle,"  Paris,  1856)  of  which  he  afterwards  (1896) 
made  a  prose  translation.  The  collection  included  also  "  The 
Friendship  of  Amis  and  Amile  "  ;  "  King  Florus  and  the  Fair 
Jehane";  and  "The  History  of  Over  Sea";  besides  "Aucas- 
sin  and  Nicolete, "  which  Morris  left  out  because  it  had  been 
already  rendered  into  English  by  Andrew  Lang. 


The  ^Pre-raphaelites.  331 

Medea  is  not  the  wronged,  vengeful  queen  of  the  Greek 
tragic  poets,  so  much  as  she  is  the  Colchian  sorceress 
who  effects  her  lover's  victory  and  escape.  Her  roman- 
tic, outweighs  her  dramatic  character.  Sea  voyages,  em- 
prizes,  and  wild  adventures,  like  those  of  his  own  wan- 
derers in  "  The  Earthly  Paradise,"  were  dearer  to  Morris* 
imagination  than  conflicts  of  the  will;  the  voaro?  or 
home-coming  of  Ulysses,  e.g.  He  preferred  the  "  Odys- 
sey "  to  the  "  Iliad,"  and  translated  it  in  1887  into  the 
thirteen-syllabled  line  of  the  "  Nibelungenlied."  *  Of 
the  Greek  tales  in  "  The  Earthly  Paradise,"  "  The  Love 
of  Alcestis  "  has,  perhaps,  the  most  dramatic  quality. 

Like  Chaucer  and  like  Rossetti,f  Morris  mediaevalised 
classic  fable.  "Troy,"  says  his  biographer,  "is  to  his 
imagination  a  town  exactly  like  Bruges  or  Chartres; 
spired  and  gabled,  red-roofed,  filled  (like  the  city  of  King 
^Eetes  in  *  The  Life  and  Death  of  Jason ')  with  towers 
and  swinging  bells.  The  Trojan  princes  go  out,  like 
knights  in  Froissart,  to  tilt  at  the  barriers."  %  The  dis- 
tinction between  classical  and  romantic  treatment  is  well 
illustrated  by  a  comparison  of  Theocritus'  idyl  "  Hylas," 
with  the  same  episode  in  "  Jason."  "  Soon  was  he  'ware 
of  a  spring,"  says  the  Syracusan  poet,  "  in  a  hollow  land, 
and  the  rushes  grew  thickly  round  it,  and  dark  swallow- 
wort,  and  green  maiden-hair,  and  blooming  parsley  and 
deer-grass  spreading  through  the  marshy  land.  In  the 
midst  of  the  water  the  nymphs  were  arraying  their 
dances,  the  sleepless  nymphs,  dread  goddesses  of  the 
country  people,  Eunice,  and  Malis,  and  Nycheia,  with 

*His  Vergil's  "^neid,"  in  the  old  fourteener  of  Chapman, 
was  published  in  1876. 
f  Vide  supra,  p.  315.  JMackail,  i.,  p.  168. 


332  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

her  April  eyes.  And  now  the  boy  was  holding  out  the 
wide-mouthed  pitcher  to  the  water,  intent  on  dipping  it; 
but  the  nymphs  all  clung  to  his  hand,  for  love  of  the 
Argive  lad  had  fluttered  the  soft  hearts  of  all  of  them. 
Then  down  he  sank  into  the  black  water."  *  In  "  Jason," 
where  the  episode  occupies  some  two  hundred  and 
seventy  lines,  one  of  the  nymphs  meets  the  boy  in  the 
wood,  disguised  in  furs  like  a  northern  princess,  and 
lulls  him  to  sleep  by  the  stream  side  with  a  Pre-Raphael- 
ite song : 

"I  know  a  little  garden  close 
Set  thick  with  lily  and  red  rose  "  ; 

the  loveliest  of  all  the  lyrical  passages  in  Morris'  narra- 
tive poems  except  possibly  the  favourite  two-part  song  in 
"  Ogier  the  Dane  " : 

"In  the  white-flower* d  hawthorne  brake, 
Love,  be  merry  for  my  sake : 
Twine  the  blossoms  in  my  hair, 
Kiss  me  where  I  am  most  fair — 
Kiss  me,  love  !  for  who  knoweth 
What  thing  cometh  after  death?" 

This  is  the  strain  which  recurs  in  all  Morris'  poetry  with 
the  insistence  of  a  burden,  and  lends  its  melancholy  to 
every  season  of  "  the  rich  year  slipping  by." 

Three  kinds  of  verse  are  employed  in  "  The  Earthly 
Paradise":  the  octosyllabic  couplet;  the  rime  royal, 
which  was  so  much  a  favourite  with  Chaucer;  and  the 
heroic  couplet,  handled  in  the  free,  "  enjambed  "  fashion 
of  Hunt  and  Keats. 

"  Love  is  Enough,"  in  the  form  of  a  fifteenth-century 
morality  play,  and  treating  a  subject  from  the  "  Mabino- 

*  Lang's  translation. 


The  "Pre-raphaelites.  333 

gion,"  appeared  in  1873.  Mackail  praises  its  delicate 
mechanism  in  the  use  of  "  receding  planes  of  action " 
(Love  is  prologue  and  chorus,  and  there  is  a  musical 
accompaniment) ;  but  the  dramatic  form  only  emphasises 
the  essentially  undramatic  quality  of  the  author's  genius. 
What  is  the  matter  with  Morris'  poetry?  For  something 
is  the  matter  with  it.  Beauty  is  there  in  abundance,  a 
rich  profusion  of  imagery.  The  narrative  moves  with- 
out a  hitch.  Passion  is  not  absent,  passionate  love 
and  regret;  but  it  speaks  a  sleepy  language,  and  the 
final  impression  is  dream-like.  I  believe  that  the  singu- 
lar lack  which  one  feels  in  reading  these  poems  comes 
from  Morris'  dislike  of  rhetoric  and  moralising,  the  two 
main  nerves  of  eighteenth -century  verse.  Left  to  them- 
selves, these  make  sad  work  of  poetry ;  yet  poetry  includes 
eloquence,  and  life  includes  morality.  The  poetry  of 
Morris  is  sensuous,  as  upon  the  whole  poetry  should  be ; 
but  in  his  resolute  abstention  from  the  generalizing  habit 
of  the  previous  century,  the  balance  is  lost  between  the 
general  and  the  concrete,  which  all  really  great  poetry 
preserves.  Byron  declaims  and  Wordsworth  moralises, 
both  of  them  perhaps  too  much ;  yet  in  the  end  to  the 
advantage  of  their  poetry,  which  is  full  of  truths,  or  of 
thoughts  conceived  as  true,  surcharged  with  emotion  and 
uttered  with  passionate  conviction.  One  looks  in  vain 
in  Morris'  pages  for  such  things  as 

"  There's  not  a  joy  the  world  can  give  like  that  it  takes  away  "  ; 

or  " — the  good  die  first, 

And  they  whose  hearts  are  dry  as  summer  dust, 

Burn  to  the  socket. " 

Such  coin  of  universal  currency  is  rare  in  Morris,  as     \J 
has  once  before  been  said.     Not  that  quotability  is  an    A 


334  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

absolute  test  of  poetic  value;  for  then  Pope  would  rank 
higher  than  Spenser  or  Shelley.  But  its  absence  in 
Morris  is  significant  in  more  than  one  way. 

While  "  The  Earthly  Paradise  "  was  in  course  of  com- 
position, a  new  intellectual  influence  came  into  Morris' 
life,  the  influence  of  the  Icelandic  sagas.  Much  had 
been  done  to  make  Old  Norse  literature  accessible  to 
English  readers  since  the  days  when  Gray  put  forth  his 
Runic  scraps  and  Percy  translated  Mallet*  Walter 
Scott,  e.g.,  had  given  an  abstract  of  the  "Eyrbyggja 
Saga."  Amos  Cottle  had  published  at  Bristol  in  1797  a 
metrical  version  of  the  mythological  portion  of  the 
"  Elder  Edda  *  ("  Icelandic  Poetry,  or  the  Edda  of  Sae- 
mund"),  with  an  introductory  verse  epistle  by  Southey. 
Sir  George  Dasent's  translation  of  the  "  Younger  Edda  " 
appeared  in  1842;  Laing's  "  Heimskringla "  in  1844; 
Dasent's  "Burnt  Nial  "  in  1861 ;  his  "Gisli  the  Outlaw," 
and  Head's  "  Saga  of  Viga-Glum "  in  1866.  William 
and  Mary  Howitt's  "  Literature  and  Romance  of  Northern 
Europe"  appeared  in  1852.  Morris  had  made  the  ac- 
quaintance of  Thorpe's  "Northern  Mythology"  (185 1) 
and  "Yuletide  Stories"  (1853)  at  Oxford;  two  of  the 
tales  in  "  The  Earthly  Paradise  "  were  suggested  by  them : 
"The  Land  East  of  the  Sun"  and  "The  Fostering  of 
Aslaug."  These,  however,  he  had  dealt  with  independ- 
ently and  in  an  ultra-romantic  spirit.  But  in  1869  he 
took  up  the  study  of  Icelandic  under  the  tuition  of  Mr. 
Erick  Magnusson;  in  collaboration  with  whom  he  is- 
sued a  number  of  translations.!  "  The  Lovers  of  Gud- 
run"  in  "The  Earthly  Paradise"  was  taken  from  the 

*  See  vol.  i.,  pp.  190-92. 

f  The "Grettis Saga"  (1869)  ;  the "  Volsunga  Saga "  (1870)  ; 
"Three  Northern  Love  Stories"  (1875). 


The  Tre-%apbaelites.  335 

"  Laxdaela  Saga,"  and  is  in  marked  contrast  with  the 
other  poems  in  the  collection.  There  is  no  romantic 
glamour  about  it.  It  is  a  grim,  domestic  tragedy,  mov- 
ing among  the  homeliest  surroundings.  Save  for  the 
lawlessness  of  a  primitive  state  of  society  which  gave 
free  play  to  the  workings  of  the  passions,  the  story  might 
have  passed  in  Yorkshire  or  New  England.  A  book  like 
"  Wuthering  Heights,"  or  "  Pembroke,"  occasionally  ex- 
hibits the  same  obstinate  Berserkir  rage  of  the  tough  old 
Teutonic  stock,  operating  under  modern  conditions.  For 
the  men  and  women  of  the  sagas  are  hard  as  iron ;  their 
pride  is  ferocious,  their  courage  and  sense  of  duty  inflex- 
ible, their  hatred  is  as  enduring  as  their  love.  The 
memory  of  a  slight  or  an  injury  is  nursed  for  a  lifetime, 
and  when  the  hour  of  vengeance  strikes,  no  compunction, 
not  even  the  commonest  human  instincts — such  as  mother 
love — can  avert  the  blow.  Signy  in  the  "Volsunga 
Saga  "  is  implacable  as  fate.  To  avenge  the  slaughter 
of  the  Volsungs  is  with  her  an  obsession,  a  fixed  idea. 
When  incest  seems  the  only  pathway  to  her  purpose,  she 
takes  that  path  without  a  moment's  hesitation.  The  con- 
temptuous indifference  with  which  she  hands  over  her 
own  little  innocent  children  to  death  is  more  terrible 
than  the  readiness  of  the  fierce  Medea  to  sacrifice  her 
young  brothers  to  Jason's  safety;  more  terrible  by  far 
than  the  matricide  of  Orestes. 

The  colossal  mythology  of  the  North  had  impressed 
Gray's  imagination  a  century  before.  Carlyle  in  his 
"  Hero  Worship  "  (1840)  had  given  it  the  preference  over 
the  Greek,  as  an  expression  of  race  character  and  imag- 
ination. '  In  the  preface  to  his  translation  of  the  "Vol- 
sunga Saga,"  Morris  declared  his  surprise  that  no  ver- 


336  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

sion  of  the  story  yet  existed  in  English.  He  said  that  it 
was  one  of  the  great  stories  of  the  world,  and  that  to  all 
men  of  Germanic  blood  it  ought  to  be  what  the  tale  of 
Troy  had  been  to  the  whole  Hellenic  race.  In  1876  he 
cast  it  into  a  poem,  "  Sigurd  the  Volsung,"  in  four  books 
in  riming  lines  of  six  iambic  or  anapaestic  feet.  "  The 
Lovers  of  Gudrun  "  drew  its  material  from  one  of  that 
class  of  sagas  which  rest  upon  historical  facts.  The 
family  vendetta  which  it  narrates,  in  the  Iceland  of  the 
eleventh  century,  is  hardly  more  fabulous — hardly  less 
realistic — than  any  modern  blood  feud  in  the  Tennessee 
mountains.  The  passions  and  dramatic  situations  are 
much  the  same  in  both.  The  "  Volsunga  Saga  "  belongs 
not  to  romantic  literature,  strictly  speaking,  but  to  the 
old  cycle  of  hero  epics,  to  that  earlier  Middle  Age  which 
preceded  Christian  chivalry.  It  is  the  Scandinavian 
version  of  the  story  of  the  Niblungs,  which  Wagner's 
music-dramas  have  rendered  in  another  art.  But  in 
common  with  romance,  it  abounds  in  superhuman  wonders. 
It  is  full  of  Eddaic  poetry  and  mythology.  Sigmund  and 
Sinfiotli  change  themselves  into  werewolves,  like  the  peo- 
ple in  "William  of  Palermo":  Sigurd  slays  Fafnir,  the 
dragon  who  guards  the  hoard,  and  his  brother  Regni,  the 
last  of  the  Dwarf-kin;  Grimhild  bewitches  Sigurd  with 
a  cup  of  evil  drink;  Sigmund  draws  from  the  hall  pillar 
the  miraculous  sword  of  Odin,  and  its  shards  are  after- 
wards smithed  by  Regni  for  the  killing  of  the  monster. 

Morris  was  so  powerfully  drawn  to  the  Old  Norse  lit- 
erature that  he  made  two  visits  to  Iceland,  to  verify  the 
local  references  in  the  sagas  and  to  acquaint  himself  with 
the  strange  Icelandic  landscapes  whose  savage  sublimity 
is  reflected  in  the  Icelandic  writings.     "  Sigurd  the  Vol- 


The  ePre-c%apbaelites.  337 

sung"  is  probably  the  most  important  contribution  of 
Norse  literature  to  English  poetry ;  but  it  met  with  no 
such  general  acceptance  as  "The  Earthly  Paradise." 
The  spirit  which  created  the  Northern  mythology  and 
composed  the  sagas  is  not  extinct  in  the  English  descend- 
ants of  Frisians  and  Danes.  There  is  something  of  it  in 
the  minstrel  ballads;  but  it  has  been  so  softened  by 
modern  life  and  tempered  with  foreign  culture  elements, 
that  these  old  tales  in  their  aboriginal,  barbaric  stern- 
ness repel.  It  is  hard  for  any  blossom  of  modern  poetry 
to  root  itself  in  the  scoriae  of  Hecla. 

An  indirect  result  of  Morris'  Icelandic  studies  was  his 
translation  of  Beowulf  (1897),  not  a  success;  another  was 
the  remarkable  series  of  prose  poems  or  romances,  which 
he  put  forth  in  the  last  ten  years  of  his  life.*  There  is 
nothing  else  quite  like  these.  They  are  written  in  a  pe- 
culiar archaic  English  which  the  author  shaped  for  him- 
self out  of  fifteenth-  and  early  sixteenth-century  models, 
like  the  "  Morte  Darthur  "  and  the  English  translation  of 
the  "  Gesta  Romanorum,"  but  with  an  anxious  preference 
for  the  Saxon  and  Danish  elements  of  the  vocabulary. 
It  is  a  dialect  in  which  a  market  town  is  called  a 
" cheaping-stead,"  a  popular  assembly  a  "folk-mote," 
foresters  are  "  wood-abiders,"  sailors  are  "  ship-carles," 
a  family  is  a  "  kindred,"  poetry  is  "  song-craft,"  t  and 

*  These,  in  order  of  publication,  were  "The  House  of  the 
Wolfings"  (1889)  ;  "The  Roots  of  the  Mountains"  (1890)  ; 
"The  Story  of  the  Glittering  Plain  (1891)  ;  "The  Wood  Be- 
yond the  World"  (1894)  ;  "The  Well  at  the  World's  End" 
(1896)  ;  "The  Water  of  the  Wondrous  Isles"  (1897)  ;  and 
"  The  Sundering  Flood  "  (1898). 

f  Morris  became  so  intolerant  of  French  vocables  that  he 
detested  and  would  "fain"  have  eschewed  the  very  word  lit- 
erature. 


338  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

any  kind  of  enclosure  is  a  "  garth."  The  prose  is  fre- 
quently interchanged  with  verse,  not  by  way  of  lyrical 
outbursts,  but  as  a  variation  in  the  narrative  method, 
after  the  manner  of  the  Old  French  cantefables,  such  as 
"  Aucassin  et  Nicolete  " ;  but  more  exactly  after  the  man- 
ner of  the  sagas,  in  which  the  azoic  rock  of  Eddaic  poetry 
crops  out  ever  and  anon  under  the  prose  strata.  This 
Saxonism  of  style  is  in  marked  contrast  with  Scott,  who 
employs  without  question  the  highly  latinised  English 
which  his  age  had  inherited  from  the  last.  Nor  are 
Morris'  romances  historical  in  the  manner  of  the  Waver- 
ley  novels.  The  first  two  of  the  series,  however,  are  his- 
torical in  the  sense  that  they  endeavour  to  reproduce 
in  exact  detail  the  picture  of  an  extinct  society.  Time 
and  place  are  not  precisely  indicated,  but  the  scene  is 
somewhere  in  the  old  German  forest,  and  the  period  is 
early  in  the  Christian  era,  during  the  obscure  wanderings 
and  settlements  of  the  Gothic  tribes.  "  The  House  of 
the  Wolfings "  concerns  the  life  of  such  a  community, 
which  has  made  a  series  of  clearings  in  "  Mirkwood  "  on 
a  stream  tributary  to  the  Rhine.  The  folk  of  Midmark 
live  very  much  as  Tacitus  describes  the  ancient  Germans 
as  living.  Each  kindred  dwells  in  a  great  common  hall, 
like  the  hall  of  the  Niblungs  or  the  Volsungs,  or  of 
King  Hrothgar  in  "  Beowulf."  Their  herding  and  agri- 
culture are  described,  their  implements  and  costumes, 
feasts  in  hall,  songs,  rites  of  worship,  public  meetings, 
and  finally  their  warfare  when  they  go  forth  against  the 
invading  Romans.  In  "  The  Roots  of  the  Mountains  " 
the  tribe  of  the  Wolf  has  been  driven  into  the  woods  and 
mountains  by  the  vanguard  of  the  Hunnish  migrations. 
In  time  they  make  head  against  these,  drive  them  back, 


The  ePre-%apbaelites.  339 

and  retake  their  fertile  valley.  In  each  case  there  is  a 
love  story  and,  as  in  Scott,  the  private  fortunes  of  the 
hero  and  heroine  are  enwoven  with  the  ongoings  of  pub- 
lic events.  But  it  is  the  general  life  of  the  tribe  that  is  of 
importance,  and  there  is  little  individual  characterisation. 
There  is  a  class  of  thralls  in  "  The  House  of  the  Wolf- 
ings,"  but  no  single  member  of  the  class  is  particular- 
ised, like  Garth,  the  thrall  of  Cedric,  in  "  Ivanhoe." 

The  later  numbers  of  the  series  have  no  semblance  of 
actuality.  The  last  of  all,  indeed,  "The  Sundering 
Flood,"  is  a  war  story  which  attains  an  air  of  geograph- 
ical precision  by  means  of  a  map — like  the  plan  of  Egdon 
Heath  in  "The  Return  of  the  Native"— but  the  region 
and  its  inhabitants  are  alike  fabulous.  Romances  such 
as  "The  Water  of  the  Wondrous  Isles"  and  "The  Wood 
beyond  the  World  "  (the  names  are  not  the  least  imagi- 
native feature  of  these  curious  books)  are  simply  a  new 
kind  of  fairy  tales.  Unsubstantial  as  Duessa  or  Armida 
or  Circe  or  Morgan  le  Fay  are  the  witch-queen  of  the  Wood 
beyond  the  World  and  the  sorceress  of  the  enchanted  Isle 
of  Increase  Unsought.  The  white  Castle  of  the  Quest, 
with  its  three  champions  and  their  ladies,  Aurea,  Atra, 
and  Viridis ;  the  yellow  dwarfs,  the  magic  boat,  the  wicked 
Red  Knight,  and  his  den,  the  Red  Hold ;  the  rings  and 
spells  and  charms  and  garments  of  invisibility  are  like 
the  wilder  parts  of  Malory  or  the  Arabian  Nights. 

^Algernon  Charles  Swinburne  was  an  early  adherent  of 
the  Pre-Raphaelite  school,  although  such  of  his  work 
as  is  specifically  Gothic  is  to  be  found  mainly  in  the 
first  series  of  "Poems  and  Ballads"  (1866);*  a  volume 

*This  collection  is  made  up  of  Swinburne's  earliest  work, 
but    is    antedated  in  point  of  publication  by  "The  Queen 


34°  <*A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

which  corresponds  to  Morris'  first  fruits,  "  The  Defence 
of  Guenevere."  If  Morris  is  prevailingly  a  Goth — a 
heathen  Norseman  or  Saxon — Swinburne  is,  upon  the 
whole,  a  Greek  pagan.  Rossetti  and  Morris  inherit  from 
Keats,  but  Swinburne  much  more  from  Shelley,  whom 
he  resembles  in  his  Hellenic  spirit,  as  well  as  in  his 
lyric  fervour,  his  shrill  radicalism — political  and  relig- 
ious— and  his  unchastened  imagination.  Probably  the 
cunningest  of  English  metrical  artists,  his  art  is  more 
closely  affiliated  with  music  than  with  painting.  Not 
that  there  is  any  paucity  of  imagery  in  his  poetry ;  the 
imagery  is  superabundant,  crowded,  but  it  is  blurred  by 
an  iridescent  spray  of  melodious  verbiage.  The  confu- 
sion of  mind  which  his  work  often  produces  does  not 
arise  from  romantic  vagueness,  from  the  dreamlike  and 
mysterious  impression  left  by  a  ballad  of  Coleridge's  or 
a  story  of  Tieck's;  but  rather,  as  in  Shelley's  case,  from 
the  dizzy  splendour  and  excitement  of  the  diction.  His 
verse,  like  Shelley's,  is  full  of  foam  and  flame,  and  the 
result  upon  the  reader  is  to  bewilder  and  exhaust.  He 
does  not  describe  in  pictures,  like  Rossetti  and  Morris, 
but  by  metaphors,  comparisons,  and  hyperboles.  Take 
the  following  very  typical  passage — the  portrait  of  Iseult 
in  "Tristram  of  Lyonesse"  (1882): 

"The  very  veil  of  her  bright  flesh  was  made 
As  of  light  woven  and  moonbeam-colored  shade 
More  fine  than  moonbeams  ;  white  her  eyelids  shone 
As  snow  sun-stricken  that  endures  the  sun, 
And  through  their  curled  and  coloured  clouds  of  deep, 
Luminous  lashes,  thick  as  dreams  in  sleep, 

Mother,  and  Rosamond "  (1861)  dedicated  to  Rossetti ;  and 
"Atalanta  in  Calydon  "  (1865).  "Poems  and  Ballads"  was 
inscribed  to  Burne-Jones. 


The  Tre^apbaelites.  341 

Shone,  as  the  sea's  depth  swallowing  up  the  sky's, 
The  springsof unjmaginable  eyes^ 
~A1F the  "wave '  s  subtler  emerald  is  pierced  through 
With  the  utmost  heaven's  inextricable  blue, 
And  both  are  woven  and  molten  in  one  sleight 
Of  amorous  colour  and  implicated  light 
Under  the  golden  guard  and  gaze  of  noon, 
So  glowed  their  aweless  amorous  plenilune, 
Azure  and  gold  and  ardent  grey,  made  strange 
With  fiery  difference  and  deep  interchange 
Inexplicable  of  glories  multiform  ; 
Now,  as  the  sullen  sapphire  swells  towards  storm 
Foamless,  their  bitter  beauty  grew  acold, 
And  now  afire  with  ardour  of  fine  gold. 
Her  flower-soft  lips  were  meek  and  passionate, 
For  love  upon  them  like  a  shadow  sate 
Patient,  a  foreseen  vision  of  sweet  things, 
A  dream  with  eyes  fast  shut  and  plumeless  wings 
That  knew  not  what  man's  love  or  life  should  be, 
Nor  had  it  sight  nor  heart  to  hope  or  see 
What  thing  should  come  ;  but,  childlike  satisfied, 
Watched  out  its  virgin  vigil  in  soft  pride 
And  unkissed  expectation  ;  and  the  glad 
Clear  cheeks  and  throat  and  tender  temples  had 
Such  maiden  heat  as  if  a  rose's  blood 
Beat  in  the  live  heart  of  a  lily-bud." 


What  distinct  image  of  the  woman  portrayed  does  one 
carry  away  from  all  this  squandered  wealth  of  words  and 
tropes?  Compare  the  entire  poem  with  one  of  Tenny- 
son's Arthurian  "  Idyls,"  or  even  with  Matthew  Arnold's 
not  over-prosperous  "  Tristram  and  Iseult,"' or  with  any 
of  the  stories  in  "  The  Earthly  Paradise,"  and  it  will  be 
seen  how  far  short  it  falls  of  being  good  verse  narrative 
— with  its  excesses  of  language  and  retarded  movement. 
Wordsworth  said  finely  of  Shakspere  that  he  could  not 
have  written  an  epic :  "  he  would  have  perished  from  a 
plethora  of  thought."  It  is  not  so  much  plethora  of 
thought  as  lavishness  of  style  which  clogs  the  wheels  in 
Swinburne.     Too  often  his  tale  is 


342  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

"Like  a  tale  of  the  little  meaning, 
Though  the  words  are  strong. " 

But  his  narrative  method  has  analogies,  not  only  with 
things  like  Shelley's  "  Laon  and  Cythna,"  but  with  Eliz- 
abethan poems  such  as  Marlowe  and  Chapman's  "  Hero 
and  Leander."  If  not  so  conceited  as  these,  it  is  equally 
encumbered  with  sticky  sweets  which  keep  the  story  from 
getting  forward. 

The  symbolism  which  characterises  a  great  deal  of 
Pre-Raphaelite  art  is  not  conspicuous  in  Swinburne, 
whose  spirit  is  not  mystical.  But  two  marks  of  the  Pre- 
Raphaelite — and,  indeed,  of  the  romantic  manner  gen- 
erally— are  obtrusively  present  in  his  early  work.  One 
of  these  is  the  fondness  for  microscopic  detail  at  the 
expense  of  the  obvious,  natural  outlines  of  the  subject. 
Thus  of  Proserpine  at  Enna,  in  the  piece  entitled  "At 
Eleusis," 

" — she  lying  down,  red  flowers 
Made  their  sharp  little  shadows  on  her  sides. " 

"Endymion"  is,  perhaps,  partly  responsible  for  this 
exaggeration  of  the  picturesque;  and  in  Swinburne,  as 
in  Keats,  the  habit  is  due  to  an  excessive  impressibility 
by  all  forms  of  sensuous  beauty.  It  is  a  sign  of  riches, 
but  of  riches  which  smother  their  possessor.  It  is  im- 
possible to  fancy  Chaucer  or  Goethe,  or  any  large,  healthy 
mind  dealing  thus  by  its  theme.  Or,  indeed,  contrast 
the  whole  passage  from  "  At  Eleusis  "  with  the  mention 
of  the  rape  of  Proserpine  in  the  "  Winter's  Tale "  and 
in  "  Paradise  Lost." 

Another  Pre-Raphaelite  trait  is  that  over-intensity  of 
spirit  and  sense  which  was  not  quite  wholesome  in  Ros- 
setti,  but  which  manifested  itself   in   Swinburne   in   a 


The  cPre-%apbaelites.  343 

morbid  eroticism.  The  first  series  of  "  Poems  and  Bal- 
lads" was  reprinted  in  America  as  "Laus  Veneris." 
The  name-poem  was  a  version  of  the  Tannhauser  legend, 
a  powerful  but  sultry  study  of  animal  passion,  and  it  set 
the  key  of  the  whole  volume.  It  is  hardly  necessary  to 
say  of  the  singer  of  the  wonderful  choruses  in  "  Atalanta  " 
and  the  equally  wonderful  hexameters  of  "Hesperia," 
that  his  imagination  has  turned  most  persistently  to  the 
antique,  and  that  a  very  small  share  of  his  work  is  to  be 
brought  under  any  narrowly  romantic  formula.  But  there 
are  a  few  noteworthy  experiments  in  mediaevalism  in- 
cluded among  these  early  lyrics.  "  A  Christmas  Carol  " 
is  a  ballad  of  burdens,  suggested  by  a  drawing  of  Ros- 
setti's,  and  full  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  colour.  The  in- 
evitable damsels,  or  bower  maidens,  are  combing  out  the 
queen's  hair  with  golden  combs,  while  she  sings  a  song 
of  God's  mother;  how  she,  too,  had  three  women  for  her 
bed-chamber — 

"The  first  two  were  the  two  Maries, 
The  third  was  Magdalen, "  * 

who  "  was  the  likest  God  " ;  and  how  Joseph,  who,  like- 
wise had  three  workmen,  Peter,  Paul,  and  John,  said  to 
the  Virgin  in  regular  ballad  style : 

"If  your  child  be  none  other  man's, 
But  if  it  be  very  mine, 
The  bedstead  shall  be  gold  two  spans, 
The  bedfoot  silver  fine. " 

*  "  Where  the  lady  Mary  is, 

With  her  five  handmaidens  whose  names 
Are  five  sweet  symphonies, 

Cecily,  Gertrude,  Magdalen, 
Margaret  and  Rosalys. " 

— "The  Blessed  Damozel." 


344  eSl  History  of  English  Itymanticism. 

"The  Masque  of  Queen  Bersabe"  is  a  miracle  play, 
and  imitates  the  rough  naivete  of  the  old  Scriptural  drama, 
with  its  grotesque  stage  directions  and  innocent  an- 
achronisms. Nathan  recommends  King  David  to  hear  a 
mass.  All  the  dramatis  persona  swear  by  Godis  rood,  by 
Paulis  head,  and  Peter's  soul,  except  "  Secundus  Miles  " 
(Paganus  auidam),  a  bad  man — a  species  of  Vice — who 
swears  by  Satan  and  Mahound,  and  is  finally  carried  off 
by  the  comic  devil : 

"£.  M.  I  rede  you  in  the  devil's  name, 

Ye  come  not  here  to  make  men  game ; 
By  Termagaunt  that  maketh  grame, 
I  shall  to-bete  thine  head. 
Hie  Diabolus  capiat  eutn. "  * 

Similarly  "  St.  Dorothy  "  reproduces  the  childlike  faith 
and  simplicity  of  the  old  martyrologies.f  Theophilus  ad- 
dresses the  Emperor  Gabalus  with  "  Beau  Sire,  Dieu  vous 
aide."  The  wicked  Gabalus  himself,  though  a  heathen, 
curses  by  St.  Luke  and  by  God's  blood  and  bones,  and 
quotes  Scripture.  Theophilus  first  catches  sight  of 
Dorothy  through  a  latticed  window,  holding  a  green  and 
red  psalter  among  a  troop  of  maidens  who  play  upon 
short-stringed  lutes.  The  temple  of  Venus  where  he  does 
his  devotions  is  a  "church"  with  stained-glass  windows. 
Heaven  is  a  walled  pleasance,  like  the  Garden  of  De- 
light in  the  "  Roman  de  la  Rose," 

"Thick  with  companies 
Of  fair-clothed  men  that  play  on  shawms  and  lutes." 

Swinburne  has  also  essayed  the  minstrel  ballad  in  vari- 
ous forms.     There  were  some  half-dozen  pieces  of  the 

*Cf.  Browning's  "The  Heretic's  Tragedy,"  supra,  p.  276. 
fThis  was  the  subject  of  Massinger's  "Virgin  Martyr." 


The  cPre-c%aphaelites.  345 

sort  in  the  "  Laus  Veneris "  volume,  of  which  several, 
like  "The  King's  Daughter  "  and  "The  Sea-Swallows," 
were  imitations  of  Rossetti's  and  Morris'  imitations,  ar- 
tistically overwrought  with  elaborate  Pre-Raphaelite  re- 
frains; others,  like  "May  Janet"  and  "The  Bloody 
Son,"  are  closer  to  popular  models.  The  third  series  of 
"Poems  and  Ballads"  (1889)  contains  nine  of  these  in 
the  Scotch  dialect,  two  of  them  Jacobite  songs.  That 
Swinburne  has  a  fine  instinct  in  such  matters  and  holds 
the  true  theory  of  ballad  imitation  is  evident  from  his 
review  of  Rossetti's  and  Morris'  work  in  the  same  kind.* 
"  The  highest  form  of  ballad  requires,  from  a  poet,"  he 
writes,  "  at  once  narrative  power,  lyrical  and  dramatic. 
...  It  must  condense  the  large,  loose  fluency  of  roman- 
tic tale-telling  into  tight  and  intense  brevity.  .  .  .  There 
can  be  no  pause  in  a  ballad,  and  no  excess;  nothing  that 
flags,  nothing  that  overflows."  He  pronounces  "  Sister 
Helen"  the  greatest  ballad  in  modern  English;  but  he 
thinks  that  "  Stratton  Water,"  which  is  less  independent 
in  composition,  and  copies  the  formal  as  well  as  the  es- 
sential characteristics  of  popular  poetry,  is  "  a  study  after 
the  old  manner  too  close  to  be  no  closer.  It  is  not 
meant  for  a  perfect  and  absolute  piece  of  work  in  the  old 
Border  fashion,  .  .  .  and  yet  it  is  so  far  a  copy  that  it 
seems  hardly  well  to  have  gone  so  far  and  no  farther. 
On  this  ground  Mr.  Morris  has  a  firmer  tread  than  the 
great  artist  by  the  light  of  whose  genius  and  kindly  guid- 
ance he  put  forth  the  first  fruits  of  his  work,  as  I  did 
afterwards.  In  his  first  book,  the  ballad  of  *  Welland 
River,'  the  Christmas  carol  in  *  The  Land  East  of  the 
Sun  and  West  of  the  Moon,'  etc.,  ...  are  examples  of 
*" Essays  and  Studies,"  pp.  85-88. 


346  <tA  History  of  English  ^manticism. 

flawless  work  in  the  pure  early  manner.  Any  less  abso- 
lute and  decisive  revival  of  mediaeval  form  .  .  .  rouses 
some  sense  of  failure  by  excess  or  default  of  resem- 
blance." 

Swinburne's  own  ballads  are  clever  and  learned  experi- 
ments, but  he  does  not  practise  the  brevity  which  he 
recommends;  some  of  them,  such  as  "The  Bloody  Son," 
"The  Weary  Wedding,"  and  "The  Bride's  Tragedy," 
otherwise  most  impressive,  would  be  more  so  if  they  were 
shorter  or  less  wordy.  Though  his  genius  is  more  lyrical 
than  dramatic,  the  fascination  which  the  dramatic  method 
has  had  for  him  from  the  first  is  as  evident  in  his  bal- 
lads as  in  his  series  of  verse  dramas,  which  begins  with 
"  The  Queen  Mother,"  and  includes  the  enormous  "  Mary 
Stuart "  trilogy.  Several  of  these  are  mediaeval  in  sub- 
ject; the  "Rosamond"  of  his  earliest  volume — Fair 
Rosamond  of  the  Woodstock  Maze — the  other  "Rosa- 
mund, Queen  of  the  Goths"  (1899)  in  which  the  period 
of  the  action  is  573  a.d.;  and  "Locrine"  (1888),  the 
hero  of  which  is  that  mythic  king  of  Britain  whose  story 
had  been  once  before  dramatised  for  the  Elizabethan 
stage;  and  whose  daughter,  "Sabrina  fair,"  goddess  of 
the  Severn,  figures  in  "  Comus."  But  these  are  no  other- 
wise romantic  than  "Chastelard"  or  "The  Queen 
Mother."  The  dramatic  diction  is  fashioned  after  the 
Elizabethans,  of  whom  Swinburne  has  been  an  enthusi- 
astic student  and  expositor,  finding  an  attraction  even  in 
the  morbid  horrors  of  Webster,  Ford,  and  Tourneur.* 

Once  more  the  poet  touched  the  Round-Table  romances 

*See  "A  Study  of  Ben  Jonson  "  ;  "John  Ford  "  (in  "Essays 
and  Studies")  ;  and  the  introductions  to  "Chapman"  and 
"Middleton  "  in  the  Mermaid  Series. 


The  Tre-^apbaelttes.  347 

in  "The  Tale  of  Balen"  (1896),  written  in  the  stanza  of 
"  The  Lady  of  Shalott,"  and  in  a  style  simpler  and  more 
direct  than  "  Tristram  of  Lyonesse."  The  story  is  the 
same  as  Tennyson's  "Balin  and  Balan,"  published  with 
"Tiresias  and  Other  Poems"  in  1885,  as  an  introduction 
to  "Merlin  and  Vivien."  Here  the  advantage  is  in 
every  point  with  the  younger  poet.  Tennyson's  version 
is  one  of  the  weakest  spots  in  the  "  Idylls."  His  hero  is 
a  rough  Northumberland  warrior  who  looks  with  admira- 
tion upon  the  courtly  graces  of  Lancelot,  and  borrows  a 
cognisance  from  Guinevere  to  wear  upon  his  shield,  in 
hope  that  it  may  help  him  to  keep  his  temper.  But  hav- 
ing once  more  lost  control  of  this,  he  throws  himself 
upon  the  ground 

"Moaning  ' My  violences,  my  violences  !'  " — 

a  bathetic  descent  not  unexampled  elsewhere  in  Tennyson. 
This  episode  of  the  old  "Morte  Darthur"  has  fine 
tragic  possibilities.  It  is  the  tale  of  two  brothers  who 
meet  in  single  combat,  with  visors  down,  and  slay  each 
other  unrecognised.  It  has  some  resemblance,  therefore, 
to  the  plan  of  "  Sohrab  and  Rustum,"  but  it  cannot  be 
said  that  either  poet  avails  himself  of  the  opportunity  for 
a  truly  dramatic  presentation  of  his  theme.  Tennyson, 
as  we  have  seen,  aimed  to  give  epic  unity  to  the  wander- 
ing and  repetitious  narrative  of  Malory,  by  selecting  and 
arranging  his  material  with  reference  to  one  leading  con- 
ception ;  the  effort  of  the  king  to  establish  a  higher  social 
state  through  an  order  of  Christian  knighthood,  and  his 
failure  through  the  gradual  corruption  of  the  Round 
Table.  He  subdues  the  history  of  Balin  to  this  purpose, 
just  as  he  does  the  history  of  Tristram  which  he  relates 


348  <iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

incidentally  only,  and  not  for  its  own  sake,  in  "  The  Last 
Tournament."  Balin's  simple  faith  in  the  ideal  chivalry 
of  Arthur's  court  is  rudely  dispelled  when  he  hears  from 
Vivien,  and  sees  for  himself,  that  the  two  chief  objects  of 
his  reverence,  Lancelot  and  the  queen,  are  guilty  lovers 
and  false  to  their  lord;  and  in  his  bitter  disappointment, 
he  casts  his  life  away  in  the  first  adventure  that  offers. 
Moreover,  in  consonance  with  his  main  design,  Tenny- 
son seeks,  so  far  as  may  be,  to  discard  whatever  in 
Malory  is  merely  accidental  or  irrational ;  whatever  is 
stuff  of  romance  rather  than  of  epic  or  drama — whose 
theatre  is  the  human  will.  To  such  elements  of  the 
wonderful  as  he  is  obliged  to  retain  he  gives,  where  pos- 
sible, an  allegorical  or  spiritual  significance.  There  are 
very  strange  things  in  the  story  of  Balin,  such  as  the  in- 
visible knight  Garlon,  a  "  darkling  manslayer  " ;  and  the 
chamber  in  the  castle  of  King  Pellam,  where  the  body  of 
Joseph  of  Arimathea  lies  in  state,  and  where  there  are  a 
portion  of  the  blood  of  Christ  and  the  spear  with  which 
his  heart  was  pierced;  with  which  spear  Sir  Balin  smites 
King  Pellam,  whereupon  the  castle  falls  and  the  two  ad- 
versaries lie  among  its  ruins  three  days  in  a  deathlike 
trance.  All  this  wild  magic — which  Tennyson  touches 
lightly — Swinburne  gives  at  full  length ;  following  Malory 
closely  through  his  digressions  and  the  roving  adventures 
— most  of  which  Tennyson  suppresses  entirely — by  which 
he  conducts  his  hero  to  his  end.  This  is  the  true  roman- 
tic method. 

As  Rossetti  for  the  Italian  and  Morris  for  the  Scandi- 
navian, Swinburne  stands  for  the  spirit  of  French  roman- 
ticism. At  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century 
France,  the  inventor  of  "  Gothic  "  architecture  and  chiv- 


The  ePre-c^aphaelites.  349 

airy  romance,  whose  literature  was  the  most  influential 
of  mediaeval  Europe,  still  represented  everything  that  is 
most  anti-mediaeval  and  anti -romantic.  Gerard  de  Nerval 
thought  that  the  native  genius  of  France  had  been  buried 
under  two  ages  of  imported  classicism;  and  that  Per- 
rault,  who  wrote  the  fairy  tales,  was  the  only  really  orig- 
inal mind  in  the  French  literature  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury. M.  Brunetiere,  on  the  contrary,  holds  that  the  true 
expression  of  the  national  genius  is  to  be  found  in  the 
writers  of  Louis  XIV. 's  time — that  France  is  instinctively 
and  naturally  classical.  However  this  may  be,  in  the 
history  of  the  modern  return  to  the  past,  French  roman- 
ticism was  the  latest  to  awake.  Somewhat  of  the  chron- 
icles, fabliaux,  and  romances  of  old  France  had  dribbled 
into  England  in  translations;*  but  Swinburne  was  per- 
haps the  first  thoroughpaced  disciple  of  the  French  ro- 
mantic school.  Victor  Hugo  is  the  god  of  his  idolatry, 
and  he  has  chanted  his  praise  in  prose  and  verse,  in 
"ode  and  elegy  and  sonnet,  "f  Gautier  and  Baudelaire 
have  also  shared  his  devotion.  J  The  French  songs  in 
"Rosamond"  and  "Chastelard"  are  full  of  romantic 
spirit.  "Laus  Veneris"  follows  a  version  of  the  tale 
given  in  Maistre  Antoine  Gaget's  "Livre  des  grandes 
merveilles  d'amour"  (1530),  in  which  the  Venusberg  is 
called  "le  mont  Horsel";    and  "The  Leper,"  a   very 

*  Vide  supra,  pp.  90,  109,  330,  and  vol.  i.,  pp.  221-22,  301. 

fSee  especially  "A  Study  of  Victor  Hugo"  (1886)  ;  the  ar- 
ticles on  "L'Homme  qui  Rif'and  "L'Annee  Terrible"  in 
"Essays  and  Studies"  (1875)  ;  and  on  Hugo's  posthumous 
writings  in  "Studies  in  Prose  and  Poetry"  (1886)  ;  "To  Vic- 
tor Hugo"  in  "Poems  and  Ballads"  (first  series)  ;  Ibid,  (sec- 
ond series)  ;  "Victor  Hugo  in  1877."  Ibid. 

\ See  "Ave  atque  Vale"  and  the  memorial  verses  in  Eng- 
lish, French,  and  Latin  on  Gautier's  death  in  "Poems  and 
Ballads  "   (second  series) . 


\ 


350  zA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

characteristic  piece -in  the  same  collection,  is  founded 
on  a  passage  in  the  "  Grandes  Chroniques  de  France  " 
(1505).  Swinburne  introduced  or  revived  in  English 
verse  a  number  of  old  French  stanza  forms,  such  as  the 
ballade,  the  sestina,  the  rondel,  which  have  since  grown 
familiar  in  the  hands  of  Dobson,  Lang,  Gosse,  and 
others.  In  the  second  series  of  "  Poems  and  Ballads " 
(1878)  he  gave  translations  of  ten  of  the  ballads  of  that 
musical  old  blackguard 

"Villon,  our  sad,  bad,  glad,  mad  brother's  name."* 

The  range  of  Swinburne's  intellectual  interests  has 
been  wider  than  that  of  Rossetti  and  Morris.  He  is  a 
classical  scholar,  who  writes  easily  in  Latin  and  Greek. 
Ancient  mythology  and  modern  politics  divide  his  atten- 
tion with  the  romantic  literatures  of  many  times  and 
countries.  Rossetti  made  but  one  or  two  essays  in  prose 
criticism,  and  Morris  viewed  the  reviewer's  art  with  con- 
tempt. But  Swinburne  has  contributed  freely  to  critical 
literature,  an  advocate  of  the  principles  of  romantic  art 
in  the  last  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century,  as  Cole- 
ridge, Lamb,  and  Hazlitt  had  been  in  the  first.  The  man- 
ner of  his  criticism  is  not  at  all  judicial.  His  prose  is 
as  lyrical  as  his  verse,  and  his  praise  and  blame  both  in 
excess — dithyrambic  laudation  or  affluent  billingsgate. 
In  particular,  he  works  the  adjective  "  divine  "  so  hard 
that  it  loses  meaning.  Yet  stripped  of  its  excited  super- 
latives, and  reduced  to  the  cool  temperature  of  ordinary 
speech,  his  critical  work  is  found  to  be  full  of  insight, 
and  his  judgment  in  matters  of  poetical  technique  almost 
always  right.     I  may  close  this  chapter  with  a  few  sen- 

*"A  Ballad  of  Francis  Villon."     Vide  supra,  pp.  298-99. 


The  'Pre-raphaelites,  351 

tences  of  his  defence  of  retrospective  literature.*  "  It  is 
but  waste  of  breath  for  the  champions  of  the  other  party 
to  bid  us  break  the  yoke  and  cast  off  the  bondage  of  that 
past,  leave  the  dead  to  bury  their  dead,  and  turn  from 
the  dust  and  rottenness  of  old-world  themes,  epic  or 
romantic,  classical  or  feudal,  to  face  the  age  wherein  we 
live.  ...  In  vain,  for  instance,  do  the  first  poetess  of 
England  and  the  first  poet  of  America  agree  to  urge  upon 
their  fellows  or  their  followers  the  duty  of  confronting 
and  expressing  the  spirit  and  the  secret  of  their  own  time, 
its  meaning,  and  its  need.  ...  If  a  poem  cast  in  the 
mould  of  classic  or  feudal  times,  of  Greek  drama  or  medi- 
aeval romance,  be  lifeless  and  worthless,  it  is  not  because 
the  subject  or  the  form  was  ancient,  but  because  the  poet 
was  inadequate.  .  .  .  For  neither  epic  nor  romance  of 
chivalrous  quest  or  classic  war  is  obsolete  yet,  or  ever 
can  be;  there  is  nothing  in  the  past  extinct  .  .  .  [Life] 
is  omnipresent  and  eternal,  and  forsakes  neither  Athens 
nor  Jerusalem,  Camelot  nor  Troy,  Argonaut  nor  Cru- 
sader, to  dwell,  as  she  does  with  equal  good  will,  among 
modern  appliances  in  London  and  New  York." 

♦"Essays  and  Studies,"  pp.  45-49- 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

{tendencies  and  'Results. 

It  has  been  mentioned  that  romanticism  was  not  purely 
a  matter  of  aesthetics,  without  relation  to  the  movement 
of  religious  and  political  thought.*  But  it  has  also  been 
pointed  out  that,  as  compared  with  what  happened  in 
Germany,  English  romanticism  was  almost  entirely  a  lit- 
erary or  artistic,  and  hardly  at  all  a  practical  force ;  that 
there  was  no  such  Zusammenhang  between  poetry  and 
life  as  was  asserted  by  the  German  romantic  school  to 
be  one  of  their  leading  principles.  Walter  Scott,  e.g.y 
liked  the  Middle  Ages  because  they  were  picturesque; 
because  their  social  structure  rested  on  a  military  basis, 
permitted  great  individual  freedom  of  action  and  even 
lawlessness,  and  thus  gave  chances  for  bold  adventure ; 
and  because  classes  and  callings  were  so  sharply  differ- 
entiated— each  with  its  own  characteristic  manners,  dia- 
lect, dress — that  the  surface  of  society  presented  a  rich 
variety  of  colour,  in  contrast  with  the  drab  uniformity 
of  modern  life.  Perhaps  to  Scott  the  ideal  life  was  that 
of  a  feudal  baron,  dwelling  in  a  Gothic  mansion,  sur- 
rounded by  retainers  and  guests,  keeping  open  house,  and 
going  a-hunting ;  and  he  tried  to  realise  this  ideal— so 
far  as  it  was  possible  under  modern  conditions — at  Ab- 
botsford.     He  respected  rank  and  pedigree,  and  liked  to 

*See  vol.  i.,  pp.  31-32. 
352 


Tendencies  and  ^sults.  353 

own  land.  He  was  a  Tory  and,  in  Presbyterian  Scot- 
land, he  was  an  Episcopalian.  But  his  mediaeval  enthu- 
siasms were  checked  by  all  kinds  of  good  sense.  He 
had  no  wish  to  restore  mediaeval  institutions  in  practice, 
In  spite  of  the  glamour  which  he  threw  over  feudal  life, 
he  knew  very  well  what  that  life  must  have  been  in  real- 
ity: its  insecurity  from  violence  and  oppression,  its  bar- 
barous discomfort;  the  life  of  nobles  in  unplumbed  stone 
castles;  the  life  of  burghers  in  walled  towns,  without 
lighting,  drainage,  or  police;  the  life  of  countrymen  who 
took  their  goods  to  market  over  miry,  roads  impassable 
half  the  year  for  any  wheeled  vehicle.)  As  to  the  Eng- 
lish poets  whom  we  have  passed  in  review,  from  Cole- 
ridge to  Swinburne,  not  one  of  them  joined  the  Catholic 
Church ;  and  most  of  them  found  romantic  literary  tastes 
quite  consistent  with  varying  shades  of  political  liberal- 
ism and  theological  heterodoxy. 

The  Anglo-Catholic  Movement. — Still  even  in  Eng- 
land, the  mediaeval  revival  in  art  and  letters  was  not 
altogether  without  influence  on  practice  and  belief  in 
other  spheres  of  thought.  Thus  the  Oxford  Tractarians  of 
1833  correspond  somewhat  to  the  throne-and-altar  party 
in  Germany.  At  Newcastle  in  1845,  William  Bell  Scott 
visited  a  painted-glass  manufactory  where  he  found  his 
friend,  Francis  Oliphant — afterwards  husband  of  Marga- 
ret Oliphant,  the  novelist — engaged  as  a  designer.  He 
describes  Oliphant  as  no  artist  by  nature,  but  a  man 
of  pietistic  feelings  who  had  "  thrown  himself  into  the 
Gothic  revival  which  was,  under  the  Oxford  movement, 
threatening  to  become  a  serious  antagonist  to  our  present 
freedom  from  clerical  domination."  Scott  adds  that  the 
master  of  this  glass-making  establishment  was  an  un- 


354  ^  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

cultivated  tradesman,  who  yet  had  the  business  shrewd- 
ness to  take  advantage  of  "the  clerical  and  architectural 
proclivities  of  the  day,"  and  had  visited  and  studied  the 
French  cathedrals.  "  These  workshops  were  a  surprise 
to  me.  Here  was  the  Scotch  Presbyterian  working-artist, 
with  a  short  pipe  in  his  mouth,  cursing  his  fate  in  having 
to  elaborate  continual  repetitions  of  saints  and  virgins — 
Peter  with  a  key  as  large  as  a  spade,  and  a  yellow  plate 
behind  his  head — yet  by  constant  drill  in  the  groove 
realising  the  sentiment  of  Christian  art,  and  at  last  able 
to  express  the  abnegation  of  self,  the  limitless  sadness 
and  even  tenderness,  in  every  line  of  drapery  and  every 
twist  of  the  lay  figure." 

Here  is  one  among  many  testimonies  to  the  influence 
of  the  Oxford  movement  on  the  fine  arts.  It  would  be 
easy  to  call  witnesses  to  prove  the  reverse — the  influence 
of  romance  upon  the  Oxford  movement.  Newman  * 
quotes  an  article  contributed  by  him  to  the  British  Critic 
for  April,  1839,  m  which  he  had  spoken  of  Tractarian- 
ism  "  as  a  reaction  from  the  dry  and  superficial  character 
of  the  religious  teaching  and  the  literature  of  the  last 
generation,  or  century.  .  .  .  farst,  I  mentioned  the  liter- 
ary influence  of  Walter  Scott,  who  turned  men's  minds  to 
the  direction  of  the  Middle  Ages.  *  The  general  need/  I 
said,  *  of  something  deeper  and  more  attractive  than  what 
had  offered  itself  elsewhere  may  be  considered  to  have 
led  to  his  popularity ;  and  by  means  of  his  popularity  he 
reacted  on  his  readers,  stimulating  their  mental  thirst, 
feeding  their  hopes,  setting  before  them  visions  which, 
when  once  seen,  are  not  easily  forgotten,  and  silently  in- 
doctrinating them  with  nobler  ideas,  which  might  after- 
*" Apologia  pro  Vita  Sua,"  p.  139. 


Tendencies  and  T^esults.  355 

wards  be  appealed  to  as  first  principles.'  "J  Of  Coleridge 
he  spoke,  in  the  same  paper,  as  having  laid  a  philosoph- 
ical basis  for  church  feelings  and  opinions;  and  of 
Southey  and  Wordsworth  as  "two  living  poets,  one  of 
whom  in  the  department  of  fantastic  fiction,  the  other  in 
that  of  philosophical  meditation,  have  addressed  them- 
selves to  the  same  high  principles  and  feelings,  and  car- 
ried forward  their  readers  in  the  same  direction."  New- 
man, like  Ruskin,  was  fond  of  Scott's  verse  as  well  as  of 
his  prose.* 

Professor  Gates  has  well  recognised  that  element  in 
romantic  art  which  affiliates  with  Catholic  tendencies. 
"  Mediaeval  ism  .  .  .  was  a  distinctive  note  of  the  Ro- 
mantic spirit,  and,  certainly,  Newman  was  intensely  alive 
to  the  beauty  and  the  poetic  charm  of  the  life  of  the 
Middle  Ages.  One  is  sometimes  tempted  to  describe 
him  as  a  great  mediaeval  ecclesiastic  astray  in  the  nine- 
teenth century  and  heroically  striving  to  remodel  modern 
life  in  harmony  with  his  temperamental  needs.  His  im- 
agination was  possessed  with  the  romantic  vision  of  the 
greatness  of  the  Mediaeval  Church — of  its  splendour  and 
pomp  and  dignity,  and  of  its  power  over  the  hearts  and 
lives  of  its  members ;  and  the  Oxford  movement  was  in 
its  essence  an  attempt  to  reconstruct  the  English  Church 

*"It  would  require  the  .  .  .  magic  pen  of  Sir  Walter  to 
catalogue  and  to  picture  .  .  .  that  most  miserable  proces- 
sion "  ("Callista:  a  Sketch  of  the  Third  Century,"  1855; 
chapter,  "  Christianos  ad  Leones  ") .  It  is  curious  to  compare 
this  tale  of  the  early  martyrs,  Newman's  solitary  essay  in 
historical  romance,  with  "Hypatia."  It  has  the  intellectual 
refinement  of  everything  that  came  from  its  author's  pen  ;  and 
it  has  strong  passages  like  the  one  describing  the  invasion  of 
the  locusts.  But.  upon  the  whole,  Newman  was  as  inferior  to 
Kingsley  as  a  novelist  as  he  was  superior  to  him  in  the  dia- 
lectics of  controversy. 


356  zA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

J 
in  harmony  with  this  romantic  ideal.  .  .  .  /As  Scott's  im- 
agination was  fascinated  with  the  picturesque  parapher- 
nalia of  feudalism — with  its  jousts,  and  courts  of  love,  and 
its  coats  of  mail  and  buff-jerkins — so  Newman's  imagi- 
nation was  captivated  by  the  gorgeous  ritual  and  ceremo- 
nial, the  art  and  architecture  of  mediaeval  Christianity. 
.  .  .  Newman  sought  to  revive  in  the  Church  a  mediae- 
val faith  in  its  own  divine  mission  and  the  intense 
spiritual  consciousness  of  the  Middle  Ages;  he  aimed 
to  restore  to  religion  its  mystical  character,  to  exalt  the 
sacramental  system  as  the  divinely  appointed  means  for 
the  salvation  of  souls,  and  to  impose  once  more  on  men's 
imaginations  the  mighty  spell  of  a  hierarchical  organi- 
sation, the  direct  representative  of  God  in  the  world's 
affairs.  .  .  .  Both  he  and  Scott  substantially  ruined 
themselves  through  their  mediaevalism.  Scott's  luckless 
attempt  was  to  place  his  private  and  family  life  upon  a 
feudal  basis  and  to  give  it  mediaeval  colour  and  beauty; 
Newman  undertook  a  much  nobler  and  more  heroic  but 
more  intrinsically  hopeless  task — that  of  re-creating  the 
whole  English  Church  in  harmony  with  mediaeval  con- 
ceptions." *  j 

All  this  is  most  true,  and  yet  it  is  easy  to  exaggerate 
the  share  which  romantic  feeling  had  in  the  Oxford 
movement.  In  his  famous  apostrophe  to  Oxford,  Mat- 
thew Arnold  personifies  the  university  as  a  "  queen  of 
romance,"  an  "  adorable  dreamer  whose  heart  has  been  so 
romantic,"  "  spreading  her  gardens  to  the  moonlight,  and 
whispering  from  her  towers  the  last  enchantments  of 
the  Middle  Age,"  and  "ever  calling  us  nearer  to  .  .  . 

*See  the  entire  section  "Selections  from  Newman,"  by 
Lewis  G.  Gates,  New  York,  1895.     Introduction,  pp.  xlvi-lix. 


Tendencies  and  l^esults.  357 

beauty."  Newman  himself  was  a  poet,  as  well  as  one  of 
the  masters  of  English  prose.  The  movement  left  an 
impress  upon  general  literature  in  books  like  Keble's 
"Christian  Year"  (1827)  and  "Lyra  Innocentium " 
(1847)  y  m  Newman's  two  novels,  "  Callista  "  and  "Loss 
and  Gain"  (1848),  and  his  "Verses  on  Various  Occa- 
sions" (1867);  and  even  found  an  echo  in  popular  fic- 
tion. Grey  in  Hughes'  "  Tom  Brown  at  Oxford  "  repre- 
sents the  Puseyite  set.  Miss  Yonge's  "  Heir  of  Redcliffe  " 
and  Shorthouse's  "  John  Inglesant "  are  surcharged  with 
High-Church  sentiment.  Newman  said  that  Keble  made 
the  Church  of  England  poetical.  "  The  author  of  *  The 
Christian  Year'  found  the  Anglican  system  all  but  des- 
titute of  this  divine  element  [poetry];  .  .  .  vestments 
chucked  off,  lights  quenched,  jewels  stolen,  the  pomp 
and  circumstances  of  worship  annihilated;  .  .  .  the  royal 
arms  for  the  crucifix ;  huge  ugly  boxes  of  wood,  sacred  to 
preachers,  frowning  on  the  congregation  in  place  of  the 
mysterious  altar;  and  long  cathedral  aisles  unused,  railed 
off,  like  the  tombs  (as  they  were)  of  what  had  been  and 
was  not."  *  Newman  praises  in  "  The  Christian  Year  " 
what  he  calls  its  "  sacramental  system  " ;  and  to  the  un- 
sympathetic reader  it  seems  as  though  Keble  saw  all 
outdoors  through  a  stained-glass  window.  The  move- 
ment had  its  aesthetic  side,  and  coincided  with  the  revival 
of  church  Gothic  and  with  the  effort  to  make  church 
music  and  ritual  richer  and  more  impressive.  But,  upon 
the  whole,  it  was  more  intellectual  than  aesthetic,  an 
affair  of  doctrine  and  church  polity  rather  than  of  eccle- 
siology;  while  the  later  phase  of  ritualism  into  which  it 
has  tapered  down  appears  to  the  profane  to  be  largely  a 
*" Essays  Critical  and  Historical"  (1846). 


35 8  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

matter  of  upholstery,  given  over  to  people  who  concern 
themselves  with  the  carving  of  lecterns  and  the  embroid- 
ery of  chasubles  and  altar  cloths;  with  Lent  lilies,  antiph- 
onal  choirs,  and  what  Carlyle  calls  the  "singular  old 
rubrics  "  of  the  English  Church  and  the  "  three  surplices 
at  All-Hallowmas." 

Newman  was,  above  all  things,  a  theologian ;  a  subtle 
reasoner  whose  relentless  logic  led  him  at  last  to  Rome. 
"  From  the  age  of  fifteen,"  he  wrote,  "  dogma  has  been 
the  fundamental  principle  of  my  religion;  I  know  no 
other  religion ;  I  cannot  enter  into  the  idea  of  any  other 
sort  of  religion ;  religion,  as  a  mere  sentiment,  is  to  me 
a  dream  and  a  mockery."  Discussions  concerning  church 
ceremonies,  liturgy,  ritual,  he  put  aside  with  some  im- 
patience. His  own  tastes  were  simple  to  asceticism. 
Mozley  says  that  Newman  and  Hurrell  Froude  induced 
several  of  the  Oriel  fellows  to  discontinue  the  use  of 
wine  in  the  common  room.  "  When  I  came  up  at 
Easter,  1825,  one  of  the  first  standing  jokes  against  the 
college  all  over  the  university  was  the  Oriel  tea-pot."  * 
Dean  Church  testifies  to  the  plainness  of  the  services  at 
St.  Mary's,  f  Aubrey  de  Vere  reports  his  urging  New- 
man to  make  an  expedition  with  him  among  the  Wicklow 
Mountains,  and  the  latter's  "  answering  with  a  smile  that 
life  was  full  of  work  more  important  than  the  enjoyment 
of  mountains  and  lakes.  .  .  .  The  ecclesiastical  imagi- 
nation and  the  mountain-worshipping  imagination  are  two 
very  different  things.  Wordsworth's  famous  '  Tintern 
Abbey'  describes  the  river  Wye,  etc.  .  .  .  The  one 
thing  which  it  did  not  see  was  the  great  monastic  ruin ; 

♦"Reminiscences,"  Thomas^Mozley,  Boston,  1882. 
I" Life  and  Letters  of  Dean  Church,"  London,  1894. 


Tendencies  and  l^esults.  359 

.  .  .  and  now  here  is  this  great  theologian,  who,  when 
within  a  few  miles  of  Glendalough  Lake,  will  not  visit 
it."  * 

There  is  much  gentle  satire  in  "  Loss  and  Gain "  at 
the  expense  of  the  Ritualistic  set  in  the  university  who 
were  attracted  principally  by  the  external  beauty  of  the 
Roman  Catholic  worship.  One  of  these  is  Bateman,  a 
solemn  bore,  who  takes  great  interest  in  "  candlesticks, 
ciboriums,  faldstools,  lecterns,  ante-pendiums,  piscinas, 
roodlofts,  and  sedilia":  wears  a  long  cassock  which 
shows  absurdly  under  the  tails  of  his  coat;  and  would 
tolerate  no  architecture  but  Gothic  in  English  churches, 
and  no  music  but  the  Gregorian.  Bateman  is  having  a 
chapel  restored  in  pure  fourteenth-century  style  and  dedi- 
cated to  the  Royal  Martyr.  He  is  going  to  convert  the 
chapel  into  a  chantry,  and  has  bought  land  about  it  for 
a  cemetery,  which  is  to  be  decorated  with  mediaeval  mon- 
uments in  sculpture  and  painting  copied  from  the  frescoes 
in  the  Campo  Santo  at  Pisa,  of  which  he  has  a  portfolio 
full  of  drawings.  "It  will  be  quite  sweet,"  he  says,  "to 
hear  the  vesper-bell  tolling  over  the  sullen  moor  every 
evening."  Then  there  is  White,  a  weak  young  aesthete 
who  shocks  the  company  by  declaring :  "  We  have  no  life 
or  poetry  in  the  Church  of  England;  the  Catholic  Church 
alone  is  beautiful.  You  would  see  what  I  mean  if  you 
went  into  a  foreign  cathedral,  or  even  into  one  of  the 
Catholic  churches  in  our  large  towns.  The  celebrant, 
deacon  and  sub-deacon,  acolytes  with  lights,  the  incense 
and  the  chanting  all  combine  to  one  end,  one  act  of 
worship."  White  is  much  exercised  by  the  question 
whether  a  sacristan  should  wear  the  short  or  the  long 
*"  Recollections  of  Aubrey  de  Vere, "  London,  1897. 


360  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

cotta.     But  he  finally  marries  and  settles  down  into  a  fat 
preferment. 

Newman's  sensitiveness  to  the  beauty  of  Catholic  re- 
ligion is  acute.  "  Her  very  being  is  poetry,"  he  writes. 
But  equally  acute  is  his  sense  of  the  danger  under  which 
religion  lies  from  the  ministration  of  the  arts,  lest  they 
cease  to  be  handmaids,  and  "  give  the  law  to  Religion." 
Hence  he  praises,  from  an  ecclesiastical  point  of  view, 
the  service  of  the  arts  in  their  rudimental  state— the  rude 
Gothic  sculpture,  the  simple  Gregorian  chant.*  A  simi- 
lar indifference  to  the  merely  aesthetic  aspects  of  Cathol- 
icism is  recorded  of  many  of  Newman's  associates;  of 
Hurrell  Froude,  e.g.,  and  of  Ward.  When  Pugin  came 
to  Oxford  in  1840  to  superintend  some  building  at  Bal- 
liol,  he  saw  folio  copies  of  St.  Buonaventura  and  Aquinas' 
"Summa  Theologiae"  lying  on  Ward's  table,  and  ex- 
claimed, "  What  an  extraordinary  thing  that  so  glorious 
a  man  as  Ward  should  be  living  in  a  room  without  mul- 
lions  to  the  windows!  "  This  being  reported  to  Ward,  he 
asked,  "What  are  mullions?  I  never  heard  of  them." 
Ward  cared  nothing  about  rood-screens  and  lancet  win- 
dows; Newman  and  Faber  preferred  the  Palladian  archi- 
tecture to  the  Gothic.f  Pugin,  on  the  other  hand,  who 
had  been  actually  converted  to  the  Roman  Church  through 


*" Idea  of  a  University"  (1852).  See  also  in  "Parochial 
and  Plain  Sermons  "  the  discourse  on  "The  Danger  of  Accom- 
plishments," and  that  on  "The  Gospel  Palaces."  In  the  lat- 
ter he  writes,  speaking  of  the  cathedrals:  "Unhappy  they 
who,  while  they  have  eyes  to  admire,  admire  them  only  for 
their  beauty's  sake ;  .  .  .  who  regard  them  as  works  of  art, 
not  fruits  of  grace. " 

f  Cardinal  Wiseman  had  a  decided  preference  for  Renais- 
sance over  Gothic,  and  the  churches  built  under  his  authority 
were  mostly  in  Italian  styles. 


Tendencies  and  l{esults.  361 

his  enthusiasm  for  pointed  architecture;  and  who,  when 
asked  to  dinner,  stipulated  for  Gothic  puddings,  for 
which  he  enclosed  designs,  was  greatly  distressed  at  the 
carelessness  about  such  matters  which  he  found  at  Ox- 
ford. A  certain  Dr.  Cox  was  going  to  pray  for  the  con- 
version of  England,  in  an  old  French  cope.  "  What  is 
the  use,"  asked  Pugin,  "of  praying  for  the  Church  of 
England  in  that  cope?  "  * 

Of  the  three  or  four  hundred  Anglican  clergymen  who 
went  over  with  Newman  in  1845,  or  some  years  later 
with  Manning,  on  the  decision  in  the  Gorham  contro- 
versy, few  were  influenced  in  any  assignable  degree  by 
poetic  motives.  "As  regards  my  friend's  theory  about 
my  imaginative  sympathies  having  led  me  astray,"  writes 
Aubrey  de  Vere,  "  I  may  remark  that  they  had  been  re- 
pelled, not  attracted,  by  what  I  thought  an  excess  of  cere- 
monial in  the  churches  and  elsewhere  when  in  Italy. 
...  It  seemed  to  me  too  sensuous."  f  Indeed,  at  the 
outset  of  the  movement  it  was  not  the  mediaeval  Church, 
but  the  primitive  Church,  the  Church  of  patristic  discipline 
and  doctrine,  that  appealed  to  the  Tractarians.  It  was 
the  Anglican  Church  of  the  seventeenth  century,  the 
Church  of  Andrewes  and  Herbert  and  Ken,  to  which 
Keble  sought  to  restore  the  "  beauty  of  holiness  " ;  and 
those  of  the  Oxford  party  who  remained  within  the  estab- 
lishment continued  true  to  this  ideal.  "  The  Christian 
Year"  is  the  genuine  descendant  of  George  Herbert's 
"Temple"  (1632).  What  impressed  Newman's  imagi- 
nation in  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  was  not  so  much  the 

*"  William  George  Ward  and  the  Oxford  Movement,"  Lon- 
don. 1889,  pp.  153-55. 
f  "  Recollections, "  p.  309. 


362  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

romantic  beauty  of  its  rites  and  observances  as  its  im- 
posing unity  and  authority.  He  wanted  an  authoritative 
standard  in  matters  of  belief,  a  faith  which  had  been 
held  semper  et  ubique  et  ab  omnibus.  The  English  Church 
was  an  Elizabethan  compromise.  It  was  Erastian,  a 
creature  of  the  state,  threatened  by  the  Reform  Bill  of 
1832,  threatened  by  every  liberal  wind  of  opinion.  The 
Thirty-nine  Articles  meant  this  to  one  man  and  that  to  an- 
other, and  there  was  no  court  of  final  appeal  to  say  what 
they  meant.  Newman  was  a  convert  not  of  his  imagina- 
tion,  but  of  his  longing  for  consistency  and  his  desire  to 
believe. 

There  is  nothing  romantic  in  either  temper  or  style 
about  Newman's  poems,  all  of  which  are  devotional  in 
subject,  and  one  of  which — "  The  Pillar  of  the  Cloud  " 
("Lead,  Kindly  Light")  (1833) — is  a  favourite  hymn  in 
most  Protestant  communions.  The  most  ambitious  of 
these  is  "The  Dream  of  Gerontius,"  a  sort  of  mystery 
play  which  Sir  Henry  Taylor  used  to  compare  with  the 
"  Divine  Comedy."  Indeed,  none  but  Dante  has  more 
poignantly  expressed  the  purgatorial  passion,  the  desire 
for  pain,  which  makes  the  spirits  in  the  flames  of  purifi- 
cation unwilling  to  intermit  their  torments  even  for  a 
moment.  The  "  happy,  suffering  soul  "  of  Gerontius  lies 
before  the  throne  of  the  Crucified  and  sings : 

"  Take  me  away,  and  in  the  lowest  deep 
There  let  me  be, 
And  there  in  hope  the  lone  night-watches  keep 
Told  out  for  me."* 

♦Frederick  William  Faber,  one  of  the  Oxford  men  who 
went  over  with  Newman  in  1845,  and  became  Superior  of  the 
Oratory  of  St.  Philip  Neri,  was  a  religious  poet  of  some  dis- 
tinction.    A  collection  of  his  hymns  was  published  in  1862. 


Tendencies  and  T^esults.  363 

Some  dozen  years  before  the  "  Tracts  for  the  Times  " 
began  to  appear  at  Oxford,  a  sporadic  case  of  conversion 
at  the  sister  university  offers  a  closer  analogy  with  the 
catholicising  process  among  the  German  romantics. 
Kenelm  Henry  Digby,  who  took  his  degree  at  Trinity 
College  in  18 19,  and  devoted  himself  to  the  study  of 
mediaeval  antiquities  and  scholastic  philosophy,  was 
actually  led  into  the  Catholic  fold  by  his  enthusiasm  for 
the  chivalry  romances,  as  Pugin  was  by  his  love  of  Gothic 
architecture.  His  singular  book,  "  The  Broad  Stone  of 
Honour,"  was  first  published  in  1822,  and  repeatedly 
afterwards  in  greatly  enlarged  form.  In  its  final  edition 
it  consists  of  four  books  entitled  respectively  "  Godefri- 
dus,"  "  Tancredus,"  "Morus"  (Sir  Thomas  More),  and 
"Orlandus,"  after  four  representative  paladins  of  Chris- 
tian chivalry.  The  title  of  the  whole  work  was  suggested 
by  the  fortress  of  Ehrenbreitstein,  the  "  Gibraltar  of  the 
Rhine."  Like  Fouque,  Digby  was  inspired  by  the  ideal 
of  knighthood,  but  he  emphasises  not  so  much  the  gal- 
lantry of  the  knight-errant  as  his  religious  character  as 
the  champion  of  Holy  Church.  The  book  is,  loosely 
speaking,  an  English  "Genie  du  Christianisme,"  less 
brilliantly  rhetorical  than  Chateaubriand,  but  more  sin- 
cerely devout.  It  is  poetic  and  descriptive  rather  than 
polemical,  though  the  author  constantly  expresses  his 
dislike  of  modern  civilisation,  and  complains  with  Burke 
that  this  is  an  age  of  sophists,  calculators,  and  econo- 
mists. He  quotes  profusely  from  German  and  French 
reactionaries,  like  Busching,*  Fritz  Stolberg,  Gorres, 
Friedrich  Schlegel,  Lamennais,  and  Joseph  de  Maistre; 
and  illustrates  his  topic  at  every  turn  from  mediaeval 
*"Ritterzeit  und  Ritterwesen. " 


364  c/7  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

chronicles,  legendaries,  romances,  and  manuals  of  chiv- 
alry ;  from  the  lives  of  Charlemagne,  St.  Louis,  Godfrey 
of  Bouillon,  the  Chevalier  Bayard,  St.  Anselm,  King 
Rene,  etc.,  and  above  all,  from  the  "  Morte  Darthur."  He 
defends  the  Crusades,  the  Templars,  and  the  monastic 
orders  against  such  historians  as  Muller,  Sismondi,  and 
Hume;  is  very  contemptuous  of  the  Protestant  conces- 
sions of  Bishop  Hurd's  "  Letters  on  Chivalry  and  Ro- 
mance ";  *  and,  in  short,  fights  a  brave  battle  against  the 
artillery  of  "the  moderns"  with  weapons  borrowed  from 
"the  armoury  of  the  invincible  knights  of  old."  The 
book  is  learned,  though  unsystematic  and  discursive,  but 
its  most  interesting  feature  is  its  curiously  personal  note, 
its  pure  spirit  of  honour  and  Catholic  piety.  The  en- 
thusiasm of  the  author  extends  itself  from  the  institutes 
of  chivalry  and  the  Church  to  the  social  and  political 
constitution  of  the  Middle  Ages.  He  is  anti-democratic 
as  well  as  anti-Protestant;  upholds  monarchy,  nobility, 
the  interference  of  the  popes  in  the  affairs  of  kingdoms, 
and  praises  the  times  when  the  doctrines  of  legislation 
and  government  all  over  Europe  rested  on  the  founda- 
tions of  the  Church. 

A  few  paragraphs  from  "  The  Broad  Stone  of  Honour  " 
will  illustrate  the  author's  entrance  into  the  Church 
through  the  door  of  beauty,  and  his  identification  of  ro- 
mantic art  with  "  the  art  Catholic."  "  It  is  much  to  be 
lamented,"  he  writes,  "that  the  acquaintance  of  the 
English  reader  with  the  characters  and  events  of  the 
Middle  Ages  should,  for  the  most  part,  be  derived  from 
the  writings  of  men  who  were  either  infidels,  or  who  wrote 
on  every  subject  connected  with  religion,  with  the  feel- 
*See  vol.  i.,  pp.  221-26. 


Tendencies  and  Insults.  365 

ings  and  opinions  of  Scotch  Presbyterian  preachers  of 
the  last  century." *  "A  distinguishing  characteristic  of 
everything  belonging  to  the  early  and  Middle  Ages  of 
Christianity  is  the  picturesque.  Those  who  now  strug- 
gle to  cultivate  the  fine  arts  are  obliged  to  have  recourse 
to  the  despised,  and  almost  forgotten,  houses,  towns,  and 
dresses  of  this  period.  As  soon  as  men  renounced  the 
philosophy  of  the  Church,  it  was  inevitable  that  their 
taste,  that  the  form  of  objects  under  their  control,  should 
change  with  their  religion;  for  architects  had  no  longer 
to  provide  for  the  love  of  solitude,  of  meditation  between 
sombre  pillars,  of  modesty  in  apartments  with  the  lancet- 
casement.  They  were  not  to  study  duration  and  solidity 
in  an  age  when  men  were  taught  to  regard  the  present  as 
their  only  concern.  When  nothing  but  exact  knowledge 
was  sought,  the  undefined  sombre  arches  were  to  be  re- 
moved to  make  way  for  lines  which  would  proclaim  their 
brevity,  and  for  a  blaze  of  light  which  might  correspond 
with  the  mind  of  those  who  rejected  every  proposition 
that  led  beyond  the  reach  of  the  senses.  ...  So  com- 
pletely is  it  beyond  the  skill  of  the  painter  or  the  poet 
to  render  bearable  the  productions  of  the  moderns,  .  .  . 
and  so  fast  are  the  poor  neglected  works  of  Christian 
antiquity  falling  to  ruin,  that  it  is  hard  to  conceive  how 
the  fine  arts  can  be  cultivated  after  another  century  has 
elapsed;  for  when  children  are  taught  in  infant  schools 
to  love  accounts  from  their  cradle,  and  to  study  political 
economy  before  they  have  heard  of  the  Red  Cross  Knight 
or  the  Wild  Hunter,  the  manner  and  taste  of  such  an  age 
will  smother  the  sparks  of  nature."  f     The  Church  sum- 

*Vol.  ii.,  p.  44  (ed.  1846). 
\lbid.,  pp.  315-16. 


366  z/1  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

moned  all  natural  beauty  to  the  ministry  of  religion. 
"Flowers  bloomed  on  the  altars;  men  could  behold  the 
blue  heaven  through  those  tall,  narrow-pointed  eastern 
windows  of  the  Gothic  choir  as  they  sat  at  vespers.  .  .  . 
The  cloud  of  incense  breathed  a  sweet  perfume;  the 
voice  of  youth  was  tuned  to  angelic  hymns;  and  the 
golden  sun  of  the  morning,  shining  through  the  coloured 
pane,  cast  its  purple  or  its  verdant  beam  on  the  embroid- 
ered vestments  and  marble  pavement."*  Or  read  the 
extended  rhapsody  which  closes  the  first  volume,  where, 
to  counteract  the  attractions  of  classic  lands,  the  author 
passes  in  long  review  the  sites  and  monuments  of  ro- 
mance in  England,  Germany,  Spain,  Italy,  and  France. 
Aubrey  de  Vere  says  that  nothing  had  been  so  "  impres- 
sive, suggestive,  and  spiritually  helpful "  to  him  as  New- 
man's "  Lectures  on  Anglican  Difficulties  "  (1850),  "with 
the  exception  of  the  *  Divina  Commedia '  and  Kenelm 
Digby's  wholly  uncontroversial  *  Mores  Catholici ' " 
(1831-40). 

The  Study  of  Medleval  Art. — The  correlation  of 
romantic  poetry,  Catholic  worship,  and  mediaeval  art  has 
been  indicated  in  the  chapter  upon  the  Pre-Raphaelites, 
as  well  as  in  the  foregoing  section  of  the  present  chapter. 
But  the  three  departments  have  other  tangential  points 
which  should  not  pass  without  some  further  mention. 
The  revival  of  Gothic  architecture  which  began  with 
Horace  Walpole  \  went  on  in  an  unintelligent  way  through 
the  eighteenth  century.  One  of  the  queerest  monuments 
of  this  new  taste — a  successor  on  a  larger  scale  to  Straw- 
berry Hill — was  Fonthill   Abbey,  near   Salisbury,  that 

*  Ibid.,  p.  350. 

fSee  vol.  i.,  chap,  vii.,  "The  Gothic  Revival." 


Tendencies  and  Results.  367 

prodigious  folly  to  which  Beckford,  the  eccentric  author 
of  "  Vathek,"  devoted  a  great  share  of  his  almost  fabu- 
lous wealth.  It  was  begun  in  1796,  took  nearly  thirty 
years  in  building,  employed  at  one  time  four  hundred 
and  sixty  men,  and  cost  over  ^273,000.  Its  most  con- 
spicuous feature  was  an  octagonal  tower  278  feet  high,  so 
ill  constructed  that  it  shortly  tumbled  down  into  a  heap 
oLruins.* 

(The  growing  taste  for  mediaeval  architecture  was  pow- 
erfully reinforced  by  the  popularity  of  Water  Scott's 
writings.  But  Abbotsford  is  evidence  enough  of  the 
superficiality  of  his  own  knowledge  of  the  art ;  and  dur- 
ing the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  Gothic  design 
was  applied  not  to  churches,  but  to  the  more  ambitious 
classes  of  domestic  architecture.  The  country  houses  of 
the  nobility  and  landed  gentry  were  largely  built  or  re- 
built in  what  was  known  as  the  castellated  style,  f  j  Mean- 
while a  truer  understanding  of  the  principles  of  pointed 
architecture  was  being  helped  by  the  publication  of 
archaeological  works  like  Britton's  "Cathedral  Antiqui- 
ties "  (1814-35),  Milner's  "Treatise  on  Ecclesiastical 
Architecture"  (18 11),  and  Rickman's  "Ancient  Exam- 
ples of  Gothic  Architecture  "  (18 19).  The  parts  of  indi- 
vidual buildings,  such  as  Westminster  Abbey  and  Lin- 

*  A  view  of  Fonthill  Abbey,  as  it  appeared  in  1822,  is  given 
in  Fergusson's  "History  of  Modern  Architecture,"  vol.  ii., 
p.  98  (third  ed.). 

fFor  Scott's  influence  on  Gothic  see  Eastlake's  "Gothic 
Revival,"  pp.  1 12-16.  A  typical  instance  of  this  castellated 
style  in  America  was  the  old  New  York  University  in  Wash- 
ington Square,  built  in  the  thirties.  This  is  the  "  Chrysalis  Col- 
lege "  which  Theodore  Winthrop  ridicules  in  "  Cecil  Dreeme  " 
for  its  "mock-Gothic"  pepper-box  turrets,  and  "deciduous 
plaster."  Fan  traceries  in  plaster  and  window  traceries  in 
cast  iron  were  abominations  of  this  period. 


368  <>A  History  of  English  ^manticism. 

coin  Cathedral,  were  carefully  studied  and  illustrated 
with  plans  and  sections  drawn  to  scale ;  and  measurement 
was  substituted  for  guesswork.  But  the  real  restorer  of 
ecclesiastical  Gothic  in  England  was  Augustus  Welby 
Northmore  Pugin,  an  enthusiast,  nay,  a  fanatic,  in  the 
cause ;  whose  "  Contrasts  "  (1836)  is  not  only  a  landmark 
in  the  history  of  the  revival  of  mediaeval  art,  but  a  most 
instructive  illustration  of  the  manner  in  which  an  aes- 
thetic admiration  of  the  Middle  Ages  has  sometimes  in- 
volved an  acceptance  of  their  religious  beliefs  and  social 
principles.  Three  generations  of  this  family  are  associ- 
ated with  the  rise  of  modern  Gothic.  The  elder  Pugin 
(Augustus  Charles)  was  a  French  emigre",  who  came  to 
England  during  the  Revolution,  and  gained  much  reputa- 
tion as  an  architectural  draughtsman,  publishing,  among 
other  things,  "Specimens  of  Gothic  Architecture,"  in 
182 1.  The  son  of  A.  W.  N.  Pugin,  Edward  Welby 
(1834-73),  also  carried  on  his  father's  work  as  a  practi- 
cal architect  and  a  writer. 

Pugin  joined  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  just  about 
the  time  when  the  "  Tracts  for  the  Times  "  began  to  be 
issued.  His  "Contrasts:  or  a  Parallel  between  the 
Architecture  of  the  Fifteenth  and  Nineteenth  Centuries  " 
is  fiercely  polemical,  and  displays  all  the  zeal  of  a  fresh 
convert.  In  the  preface  to  the  second  edition  he  says 
that  "when  this  work  was  first  brought  out  [1836],  the 
very  name  of  Christian  art  was  almost  unknown  " ;  and 
he  affirms,  in  a  footnote,  that  in  the  whole  of  the  national 
museum,  "  there  is  not  even  one  room,  one  shelf,  devoted 
to  the  exquisite  productions  of  the  Middle  Ages."  The 
book  is  a  jeremiad  over  the  condition  to  which  the  cathe- 
drals and  other  remains  of  English  ecclesiastical  archi- 


Tendencies  and  ^sults.  369 

tecture  had  been  reduced  by  the  successive  spoliations 
and  mutilations  in  the  times  of  Henry  VIII.,  Edward 
VI.,  and  Cromwell,  and  by  the  "vile"  restorations  of 
later  days.  It  maintains  the  thesis  that  pointed  architec- 
ture is  not  only  vastly  superior  artistically,  but  that  it  is 
the  only  style  appropriate  to  Christian  churches;  "in  it 
alone  we  find  the  faith  of  Christianity  embodied  and  its 
practices  illustrated."  Pugin  denounces  alike  the  Renais- 
sance and  the  Reformation,  "  those  two  monsters,  revived 
Paganism  and  Protestantism."  There  is  no  chance,  he 
thinks,  for  a  successful  revival  of  Gothic  except  in  a  re- 
turn to  Catholic  faith.  "  The  mechanical  part  of  Gothic 
architecture  is  pretty  well  understood,  but  it  is  the  prin- 
ciples which  influenced  ancient  compositions,  and  the 
soul  which  appears  in  all  the  former  works,  which  is  so 
lamentably  deficient.  .  .  .  'Tis  they  alone  that  can  re- 
store pointed  architecture  to  its  former  glorious  state; 
without  it  all  that  is  done  will  be  a  tame  and  heartless 
copy."  He  points  out  the  want  of  sympathy  between 
"  these  vast  edifices  "  and  the  Protestant  worship,  which 
might  as  well  be  carried  on  in  a  barn  or  conventicle  or 
square  meeting-house.  Hence,  the  nave  has  been  blocked 
up  with  pews,  the  choir  or  transept  partitioned  off  to  serve 
as  a  parish  church,  roodloft  and  chancel  screen  removed, 
the  altar  displaced  by  a  table,  and  the  sedilia  scattered 
about  in  odd  corners.  The  contrast  between  old  and 
new  is  strikingly  presented,  by  way  of  object  lessons,  in 
a  series  of  plates,  arranged  side  by  side,  and  devised 
with  a  great  deal  of  satirical  humour.  There  is,  e.g.t  a 
Catholic  town  in  1440,  rich  with  its  ancient  stone  bridge, 
its  battlemented  wall  and  city  gate,  and  the  spires  and 
towers  of  St.  Marie's  Abbey,  the  Guild  Hall,  Queen's 


37©  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Cross,  St.  Cuthbert's  Church,  and  the  half-timbered, 
steep-roofed,  gabled  houses  of  the  burgesses.  Over 
against  it  is  the  picture  of  the  same  town  in  1840,  hide- 
ous with  the  New  Jail,  Gas  Works,  Lunatic  Asylum, 
Wesleyan  Chapel,  New  Town  Hall,  Iron  Works,  Quaker 
Meeting-house,  Socialist  Hall  of  Science,  and  other 
abominations  of  a  prosperous  modern  industrial  commu- 
nity. Or  there  is  the  beautiful  old  western  doorway  of 
St.  Mary  Overies,  destroyed  in  1838.  The  door  stands 
invitingly  open,  showing  the  noble  interior  with  kneeling 
worshippers  scattered  here  and  there  over  the  unob- 
structed pavement.  Opposite  is  the  new  door,  grimly 
closed,  with  a  printed  notice  nailed  upon  it:  "Divine 
Service  on  Sundays.  Evening  lecture."  A  separate 
plate  exhibits  a  single  compartment  of  the  old  door  curi- 
ously carved  in  oak ;  and  beside  it  a  compartment  of  the 
new  door  in  painted  deal  and  plain  as  a  pike-staff. 

But  the  author  is  forced  to  confess  that  the  case  is  not 
much  better  in  Catholic  countries,  where  stained  win- 
dows have  been  displaced  by  white  panes,  frescoed  ceil- 
ings covered  with  a  yellow  wash,  and  the  "bastard  pagan 
style  "  introduced  among  the  venerable  sanctities  of  old 
religion.  English  travellers  return  from  the  Continent 
disgusted  with  the  tinsel  ornament  and  theatrical  trum- 
peries that  they  have  seen  in  foreign  churches.  "  I  do 
not  think,"  he  concludes,  "  the  architecture  of  our  Eng- 
lish churches  would  have  fared  much  better  under  a 
Catholic  hierarchy.  ...  It  is  a  most  melancholy  truth 
that  there  does  not  exist  much  sympathy  of  idea  between 
a  great  portion  of  the  present  Catholic  body  in  England 
and  their  glorious  ancestors.  .  .  .  Indeed,  such  is  the 
total  absence  of  solemnity  in  a  great  portion  of  modern 


Tendencies  and  %esults.  371 

Catholic  buildings  in  England,  that  I  do  not  hesitate  to 
say  that  a  few  crumbling  walls  and  prostrate  arches  of  a 
religious  edifice  raised  during  the  days  of  faith  will 
convey  a  far  stronger  religious  impression  to  the  mind 
than  the  actual  service  of  half  the  chapels  in  England." 

In  short,  Pugin's  Catholicism,  though  doubtless  sin- 
cere, was  prompted  by  his  professional  feelings.  His 
reverence  was  given  to  the  mediaeval  Church,  not  to  her 
— aesthetically — degenerate  daughter;  and  it  extended  to 
the  whole  system  of  life  and  thought  peculiar  to  the  Mid- 
dle Ages.  "  Men  must  learn,"  he  wrote,  "  that  the  period 
hitherto  called  dark  and  ignorant  far  excelled  our  age  in 
wisdom,  that  art  ceased  when  it  is  said  to  have  been  re- 
vived, that  superstition  was  piety,  and  bigotry  faith."  In 
many  of  his  views  Pugin  anticipates  Ruskin.  He  did 
not  like  St.  Peter's  at  Rome,  and  said:  "  If  those  students 
who  journey  to  Italy  to  study  art  would  follow  the  steps 
of  the  great  Overbeck,*  .  .  .  they  would  indeed  derive 
inestimable  benefit.  Italian  art  of  the  thirteenth,  four- 
teenth, and  fifteenth  centuries  is  the  beau  ideal  of  Chris- 
tian purity,  and  its  imitation  cannot  be  too  strongly  in- 
culcated; but  when  it  forsook  its  pure,  mystical,  and 
ancient  types,  to  follow  those  of  sensual  Paganism,  it 
sunk  to  a  fearful  state  of  degradation." 

As  a  practising  architect  Pugin  naturally  received  and 
executed  many  commissions  for  Catholic  churches.  But 
the  Catholic  Church  in  England  did  much  less,  even  in 
proportion  to  its  resources,  than  the  Anglican  establish- 
ment towards  promoting  the  Gothic  revival.  Eastlake 
says  that  Pugin's  "  strength  as  an  artist  lay  in  the  design 
of  ornamental  detail  " ;  and  that  he  helped  importantly  in 
*  Vide  supra,  p.  153. 


37 2  *d  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

the  revival  of  the  mediaeval  taste  in  stained  glass,  metal 
work,  furniture,  carpets,  and  paper-hangings.  Several  of 
his  works  have  to  do  with  various  departments  of  eccle- 
siology;  chancel-screens,  roodlofts,  church  ornaments, 
symbols  and  costumes,  and  the  like.  But  the  only  one 
that  need  here  be  mentioned  is  the  once  very  influential 
"  True  Principles  of  Pointed  or  Christian  Architecture  " 
(1841).  This  revival  of  ecclesiastical  Gothic  fell  in  with 
the  reform  of  Anglican  ritual,  which  was  one  of  the  fea- 
tures or  sequences  of  the  Oxford  movement,  and  the  two 
tendencies  afforded  each  other  mutual  support. 

Evidence  of  a  newly  awakened  interest  in  mediaeval 
art  is  furnished  by  a  number  of  works  of  a  more  syste- 
matic character  which  appeared  about  the  middle  of  the 
century,  dealing  not  only  with  architecture,  but  with  the 
early  schools  of  sculpture  and  painting.  One  of  these 
was  "Sketches  of  the  History  of  Christian  Art"  (3  vols., 
1847)  by  Alexander  William  Crawford  Lindsay,  twenty- 
fifth  Earl  of  Crawford.  In  the  preface  to  the  reprint  of 
this  book  in  1885,  Lady  Crawford  speaks  of  it  as  a 
pioneer  in  an  "  early  time  of  unawakened  interest."  Rus- 
kin  refers  to  it  repeatedly — always  with  respect — and 
acknowledges  in  "  Praeterita  "  that  Lord  Lindsay  knew  a 
great  deal  more  about  Italian  art  than  he  himself  did. 
The  book  reviews  in  detail  the  works  of  Christian  build- 
ers, sculptors  and  painters,  both  in  Italy  and  north  of 
the  Alps,  from  the  time  of  the  Roman  catacombs  and 
basilicas  down  to  the  Renaissance.  It  gives  likewise  a 
history  of  Christian  mythology,  iconography  and  symbol- 
ism; all  that  great  body  of  popular  beliefs  about  angels, 
devils,  saints,  martyrs,  anchorites,  miracles,  etc.,  which 
Protestant  iconoclasm  and  the  pagan  spirit  of  the  cinque- 


Tendencies  and  'Results.  373 

cento  had  long  ago  swept  into  the  dust-bin  as  sheer  idol- 
atry and  superstition.  Lord  Lindsay's  treatment  of  these 
matters  is  reverential,  though  his  own  Protestantism  is 
proof  against  their  charm.  His  tone  is  moderate;  he 
has  no  quarrel  with  the  Renaissance,  and  professes  re- 
spect for  classical  art,  which  seems  to  him,  however,  on 
a  lower  spiritual  plane  than  the  Christian.  He  remarks 
that  all  mediaeval  art  was  religious;  the  only  concession 
to  the  secular  being  found  in  the  illuminations  of  some 
of  the  chivalry  romances.  Gothic  architecture  was  the 
expression  of  Teutonic  genius,  which  is  realistic  and 
stands  for  the  reason,  while  Italian  sacred  painting  was 
idealistic  and  stands  for  the  imagination.  In  the  most 
perfect  art,  as  in  the  highest  type  of  religion,  reason  and 
imagination  are  in  balance.  Hence,  the  influence  of 
Van  Eyck,  Memling,  and  Diirer  on  Italian  painters  was 
wholesome ;  and  the  Reformation,  the  work  of  the  rea- 
soning Teutonic  mind,  is  not  to  be  condemned.  Reason 
is  to  blame  only  when  it  goes  too  far  and  extinguishes 
imagination.* 

"The  sympathies  of  the  North,  or  of  the  Teutonic 
race,  are  with  Death,  as  those  of  the  Southern,  or  classic, 
are  with  Life.  .  .  .  The  exquisitely  beautiful  allegorical 
tale  of  *  Sintram  and  His  Companions ■  by  La  Motte 
Fouqud,  was   founded   on   the   *  Knight  and  Death '  of 

*  "  A  blast  from  the  icy  jaws  of  Reason,  the  wolf  Fenris  of 
the  Teutonic  mind,  swept  one  and  all  into  the  Limbo  of  ob 
livion— that  sole  ante-chamber  spared  by  Protestantism  in 
spoiling  Purgatory.  Perhaps  this  was  necessary  and  inevi- 
table. If  we  would  repair  the  column,  we  must  cut  away  the 
ivy  that  clings  around  the  shaft,  the  flowers  and  brushwood 
that  conceal  the  base ;  but  it  does  not  follow  that,  when  the 
repairs  are  completed,  we  should  isolate  it  in  a  desert, — that 
the  flowers  and  brushwood  should  not  be  allowed  to  grow  up 
and  caress  it  as  before  "   (vol.  ii.,  p.  380,  second  ed.). 


374-  e/tf  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

Albert  Diirer,  and  I  cannot  but  think  that  Milton  had  the 
'  Melancholy '  in  his  remembrance  while  writing  '  II 
Penseroso.'  "  *  The  author  thinks  that,  whatever  may  be 
true  of  Gothic  architecture — an  art  less  national  than  ec- 
clesiastical— "  sculpture  and  painting,  on  the  one  hand, 
and  the  spirit  of  chivalry  on  the  other,  have  usually  flour- 
ished in  an  inverse  ratio  one  to  the  other,  and  it  is  not 
therefore  in  England,  France,  or  Spain,  but  among  the 
free  cities  of  Italy  and  Germany  that  we  must  look  for 
their  rise."  t  I  give  these  conclusions — so  opposite  to 
those  of  Catholic  medievalists  like  Digby  and  Pugin — 
because  they  illustrate  the  temper  of  Lindsay's  book. 
One  more  quotation  I  will  venture  to  add  for  its  agree- 
ment with  Uvedale  Price's  definition  of  the  picturesque  :  J 
"The  picturesque  in  art  answers  to  the  romantic  in 
poetry ;  both  stand  opposed  to  the  classic  or  formal  school 
— both  may  be  defined  as  the  triumph  of  nature  over  art, 
luxuriating  in  the  decay,  not  of  her  elemental  and  ever- 
lasting beauty,  but  of  the  bonds  by  which  she  had  been 
enthralled  by  man.  It  is  only  in  ruin  that  a  building 
of  pure  architecture,  whether  Greek  or  Gothic,  becomes 
picturesque."  § 

Lord  Lindsay's  "  Sketches  "  contained  no  illustrations. 
Mrs.  Jameson's  very  popular  series  on  "Sacred  and 
Legendary  Art "  was  profusely  embellished  with  wood- 
cuts and  etchings.  The  first  number  of  the  series,  "  Leg- 
ends of  the  Saints  and  Martyrs,"  was  begun  in  1842,  but 
issued  only  in  1848.     "  Legends  of  the  Monastic  Orders  " 


*  Vol.  ii.,  p.  364,  note;  and  vide  supra,  p.  152. 

f  Ibid.,  p.  289. 

t  Vide  supra,  p.  34. 

%lbid.,  p.  286,  note. 


Tendencies  and  Results.  375 

followed  in  1850;  "Legends  of  the  Madonna"  in  1852  ; 
and  the  "History  of  Our  Lord"  (completed  by  Lady 
Eastlake)  in  i860.  Mrs.  Jameson  had  an  imperfect 
knowledge  of  technique,  and  her  work  was  descriptive 
rather  than  critical.  But  it  probably  did  more  to  enlist 
the  interest  of  the  general  reader  in  Christian  art  than 
Lord  Lindsay's  more  learned  volumes;  or  possibly  even 
than  the  brilliant  but  puzzling  rhetoric  of  Ruskin. 

With  Pugin's  "  Contrasts "  began  the  "  Battle  of  the 
Styles."  This  was  soon  decided  in  Pugin's  favour,  so 
far  as  ecclesiastical  buildings  were  concerned.  Fergus- 
son,  who  is  hostile  to  Gothic,  admits  that  wherever  cler- 
ical influence  extended,  the  style  came  into  fashion.  The 
Cambridge  Camden  Society  was  founded  in  1839  for  the 
study  of  church  architecture  and  ritual,  and  issued  the 
first  number  of  its  magazine,  The  Ecclesiologist,  in  1841. 
But  the  first  national  triumph  for  secular  Gothic  was  won 
when  Barry's  design  for  the  new  houses  of  Parliament 
was  selected  from  among  ninety-seven  competing  plans. 
The  corner-stone  was  laid  at  Westminster  in  1840,  and 
much  of  the  detail,  as  the  work  went  on,  was  furnished 
by  Pugin. 

It  was  not  long  before  the  Gothic  revival  found  an  ally 
in  the  same  great  writer  who  had  already  come  forward 
as  the  champion  of  Pre-Raphaelite  painting.  The  mas- 
terly analysis  of  "  The  Nature  of  Gothic  "  in  "  The  Stones 
of  Venice"  (vol.  i.,  i8jji;  vols.  ii.  and  iii.,  1853),  and 
the  eloquence  and  beauty  of  a  hundred  passages  through- 
out the  three  volumes,  fascinated  a  public  which  cared 
little  about  art,  but  knew  good  literature  when  they  saw 
it.  Eastlake  testifies  that  Ruskin  had  some  practical  in- 
fluence on  English  building.    Young  artists  went  to  Venice 


376  *A  History  of  English  %omanticism. 

to  study  the  remains  of  Italian  Gothic,  and  the  results  of 
their  studies  were  seen  in  the  surface  treatment  of  many 
London  facades,  especially  in  the  cusped  window  arches, 
and  in  the  stripes  of  coloured  bricks  which  give  a  zebra- 
like appearance  to  the  architecture  of  the  period.  But, 
in  general,  working  architects  were  rather  contemptuous 
of  Ruskin's  fine-spun  theories,  which  they  ridiculed  as 
fantastic,  self -contradictory,  and  super-subtle;  rhetoric 
or  metaphysics,  in  short,  and  not  helpful  art  criti- 
cism. 

Ruskin's  adhesion  to  Gothic  was  without  compromise. 
It  was  "not  only  the  best,  but  the  only  rational  archi- 
tecture." "I  plead  for  the  introduction  of  the  Gothic 
form  into  our  domestic  architecture,  not  merely  because 
it  is  lovely,  but  because  it  is  the  only  form  of  faithful, 
strong,  enduring,  and  honourable  building,  in  such  ma- 
terials as  come  daily  to  our  hands."  *  On  the  other 
hand,  Roman  architecture  is  essentially  base;  the  study 
of  classical  literature  is  "pestilent";  and  most  modern 
building  is  the  fruit  of  "  the  Renaissance  poison  tree." 
"If  .  .  .  any  of  my  readers  should  determine  ...  to 
set  themselves  to  the  revival  of  a  healthy  school  of  archi- 
tecture in  England,  and  wish  to  know  in  few  words  how 
this  may  be  done,  the  answer  is  clear  and  simple.  First, 
let  us  cast  out  utterly  whatever  is  connected  with  the 
Greek,  Roman,  or  Renaissance  architecture,  in  principle 
or  in  form.  .  .  .  The  whole  mass  of  the  architecture, 
founded  on  Greek  and  Roman  models,  which  we  have 
been  in  the  habit  of  building  for  the  last  three  centuries, 
is  utterly  devoid  of  all  life,  virtue,  honourableness,  or 
power  of  doing  good.     It  is  base,  unnatural,  unfruitful, 

*" Stones  of  Venice,"  vol.  ii.,  p.  295  (American  ed.  i860). 


Tendencies  and  Results.  377 

unenjoyable,  and  impious.     Pagan  in  its  origin,  proud 
and  unholy  in  its  revival,  paralysed  in  its  old  age."  * 

Ruskin  loved  the  religious  spirit  of  the  mediaeval 
builders,  Byzantine,  Lombard,  or  Gothic;  and  the  pure 
and  holy  faith  of  the  early  sacred  painters  like  Fra 
Angelico,  Orcagna,  and  Perugino.  He  thought  that 
whatever  was  greatest  even  in  Raphael,  Leonardo,  and 
Michelangelo  came  from  their  training  in  the  old  relig- 
ious school,  not  from  the  new  science  of  the  Renaissance. 
"  Raphael  painted  best  when  he  knew  least."  He  de- 
plored the  harm  to  Catholic  and  Protestant  alike  of  the 
bitter  dissensions  of  the  Reformation.  But  he  sorrow- 
fully acknowledged  the  corruption  of  the  ancient  Church, 
and  had  no  respect  for  modern  Romanism.  Against  the 
opinion  that  Gothic  architecture  was  fitted  exclusively 
for  ecclesiastical  uses,  he  strongly  protested.  On  the 
contrary,  he  advised  its  reintroduction,  especially  in 
domestic  building.  "  Most  readers  .  .  .  abandon  them- 
selves drowsily  to  the  impression  that  Gothic  is  a  pecul- 
iarly ecclesiastical  style.  .  .  .  The  High  Church  and 
Romanist  parties  .  .  .  have  willingly  promulgated  the 
theory  that,  because  all  the  good  architecture  that  is  now 
left  is  expressive  of  High  Church  or  Romanist  doctrines, 
all  good  architecture  ever  has  been  and  must  be  so — 
a  piece  of  absurdity.  .  .  .  Wherever  Christian  Church 
architecture  has  been  good  and  lovely,  it  has  been  merely 
the  perfect  development  of  the  common  dwelling-house 
architecture  of  the  period.  .  .  .  The  churches  were  not 
separated  by  any  change  of  style  from  the  buildings 
round  them,  as  they  are  now,  but  were  merely  more  fin- 
ished and  full  examples  of  a  universal  style.  .  .  .  Be- 
*  Ibid.,  vol.  iii.,  p.  213. 


373  iA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

cause  the  Gothic  and  Byzantine  styles  are  fit  for  churches, 
they  are  not  therefore  less  fit  for  dwellings.  They  are  in 
the  highest  sense  fit  and  good  for  both,  nor  were  they 
ever  brought  to  perfection  except  when  they  were  used 
for  both."  * 

The  influence  of  Walter  Scott  upon  Ruskin  is  note- 
worthy. A3  a  child  he  read  the  Bible  on  Sundays  and 
the  Waverley  Novels  on  week-days,  and  he  could  not  re- 
call the  time  when  either  had  been  unknown  to  him.  The 
freshness  of  his  pleasure  in  the  first  sight  of  the  frescoes 
of  the  Campo  Santo  he  describes  by  saying  that  it  was 
like  having  three  new  Scott  novels. f  Ruskin  called 
himself  a  "king's  man,"  a  "violent  illiberal,"  and  a 
"  Tory  of  the  old-fashioned  school,  the  school  of  Walter 
Scott."  Like  Scott,  he  was  proof  against  the  religious 
temptations  of  mediaevalism.  "  Although  twelfth-century 
psalters  are  lovely  and  right,"  he  was  not  converted  to 
Catholic  teachings  by  his  admiration  for  the  art  of  the 
great  ages;  and  writes,  with  a  touch  of  contempt,  of 
those  who  are  "  piped  into  a  new  creed  by  the  squeak  of 
an  organ  pipe."  If  Scott  was  unclassical,  Ruskin  was 
anti-classical.  The  former  would  learn  no  Greek;  and 
the  latter  complained  that  Oxford  taught  him  all  the 
Latin  and  Greek  that  he  would  learn,  but  did  not  teach 
him  that  fritillaries  grew  in  Iffley  meadow.J  Even  that 
fondness  for  costume  which  has  been  made  a  reproach 

*  Ibid.,  vol.  ii.,  pp.  109-14. 

f  See  the  final  instalment  of  "  Praeterita  "  for  an  extended 
eulogy  of  Scott's  verse  and  prose. 

%"I  know  what  white,  what  purple  fritillaries 
The  grassy  harvest  of  the  river-fields 
Above  by  Ensham,  down  by  Sandford,  yields." 

— Matthew  Arnold,  "Thyrsis." 


Tendencies  and  ^  suits.  379 

against  Scott  finds  justification  with  Ruskin.  "  The  es- 
sence of  modern  romance  is  simply  the  return  of  the 
heart  and  fancy  to  the  things  in  which  they  naturally 
take  pleasure;  and  half  the  influence  of  the  best  ro- 
mances, of  *  Ivanhoe,'  or  '  Marmion,'  or  *  The  Crusaders,' 
or  '  The  Lady  of  the  Lake/  is  completely  dependent  upon 
the  accessories  of  armour  and  costume."  *  Still  Ruskin 
had  the  critical  good  sense  to  rate  such  as  they  below  the 
genuine  Scotch  novels,  like  "  Old  Mortality  "  and  "  The 
Heart  of  Mid-Lothian";  and  he  is  quite  stern  towards 
the  melodramatic  Byronic  ideal  of  Venice.  "The  impo- 
tent feelings  of  romance,  so  singularly  characteristic  of 
this  century,  may  indeed  gild,  but  never  save  the  re- 
mains of  those  mightier  ages  to  which  they  are  attached 
like  climbing  flowers;  and  they  must  be  torn  away  from 
the  magnificent  fragments,  if  we  would  see  them  as  they 
stood  in  their  own  strength.  .  .  .  The  Venice  of  modern 
fiction  and  drama  is  a  thing  of  yesterday,  a  mere  efflor- 
escence of  decay,  a  stage  dream."  f  For  it  cannot  be  too 
often  repeated  that  the  romance  is  not  in  the  Middle 
Ages  themselves,  but  in  their  strangeness  to  our  imagi- 
nation. The  closer  one  gets  to  them,  the  less  romantic 
they  appear. 

Mediaeval  Social  Ideals. — It  is  obvious  how  a  fond- 
ness for  the  Middle  Ages,  in  a  man  of  Scott's  conserva- 
tive temper,  might  confirm  him  in  his  attachment  to  high 
Tory  principles  and  to  an  aristocratic-feudal  ideal  of 
society;  or  how,  in  an  enthusiastic  artist  like  Pugin,  and 
a  gentleman  of  high-strung  chivalric  spirit  like  Sir 
Kenelm  Digby,  it  might  even  lead  to  an  adoption  of 

*" Stones  of  Venice,"  vol.  iii.,  p.  2X1. 
f  Ibid.,  vol.  ii.,  p.  4. 


/ 


380  <iA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

the  whole  mediaeval  religious  system.  But  it  is  not  so 
easy,  at  first  sight,  to  understand  why  the  same  thing 
should  have  conducted  Ruskin  and  William  Morris  to 
opinions  that  were  more  "  advanced  *  than  those  of  the 
most  advanced  Liberal.  Orthodox  economists  looked 
upon  the  theories  put  forward  in  Ruskin's  "  Unto  this 
Last"  (i860),  "  Munera  Pulveris  "  (1862-63),  and  "Fors 
Clavigera"  (1871-84),  as  the  eccentricities  of  a  distin- 
guished art  critic,  disporting  himself  in  unfamiliar  fields 
of  thought.  And  when  in  1883  the  poet  of  "  The  Earthly 
Paradise"  joined  the  Democratic  Federation,  and  subse- 
quently the  Socialist  League,  and  was  arrested  and  fined 
one  shilling  and  costs  for  addressing  open-air  meetings, 
obstructing  public  highways,  and  striking  policemen, 
amusement  was  mingled  with  disapproval.  What  does 
this  dreamer  of  dreams  and  charming  decorative  artist 
in  a  London  police  court? 

But  Socialism,  though  appearing  on  the  face  of  it  the 
most  modern  of  doctrines,  is  in  a  sense  reactionary,  like 
Catholicism,  or  knight-errantry,  or  Gothic  architecture. 
That  is,  those  who  protest  against  the  individualism  of 
the  existing  social  order  are  wont  to  contrast  it  unfavour- 
ably with  the  principle  of  association  which  is  found 
everywhere  in  the  Middle  Ages.  No  mediaeval  man  was 
free  or  independent;  all  men  were  members  one  of  an- 
other. The  feudal  system  itself  was  an  elaborate  network 
of  interdependent  rights  and  obligations,  in  which  ser- 
vice was  given  in  return  for  protection.  The  vassal  did 
homage  to  his  lord — became  his  homme  or  man — and  his 
lord  was  bound  to  take  care  of  him.  In  theory,  at  least, 
every  serf  was  entitled  to  a  living.  In  theory,  too,  the 
Church  embraced    all   Christendom.     None    save   Jews 


Tendencies  and  Results.  381 

were  outside  it  or  could  get  outside  it,  except  by  excom- 
munication; which  was  the  most  terrible  of  penalties, 
because  it  cut  a  man  off  from  all  spiritual  human  fellow- 
ship. The  same  principle  of  co-operation  prevailed  in 
mediaeval  industry  and  commerce,  organised  into  guilds 
of  craftsmen  and  trading  corporations,  which  fixed  the 
prices  and  quality  of  goods,  the  number  of  apprentices 
allowed,  etc.  The  manufacturer  was  not  a  capitalist,  but 
simply  a  master  workman.  Government  was  paternal 
and  interfered  continually  with  the  freedom  of  contract 
and  the  rights  of  the  individual.  Here  was  where  Carlyle 
took  issue  with  modern  Liberalism,  which  proclaims  that 
the  best  government  is  that  which  governs  least.  Accord- 
ing to  the  laissez-faire  doctrine,  he  said,  the  work  of  a 
government  is  not  that  of  a  father,  but  of  an  active  parish 
constable.  The  duty  of  a  government  is  to  govern,  but 
this  theory  makes  it  its  duty  to  refrain  from  governing. 
Not  liberty  is  good  for  men,  but  obedience  and  stern 
discipline  under  wise  rulers,  heroes,  and  heaven-sent 
kings.  Carlyle  took  no  romantic  view  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  He  is  rather  contemptuous  of  Scott's  mediaeval- 
picturesque,*  and  his  Scotch  Calvinism  burns  fiercely 
against  the  would-be  restorers  of  mediaeval  religious 
formularies  and  the  mummeries  of  "the  old  Pope  of 
Rome  " — a  ghastly  survival  of  a  dead  creed.f  He  said 
that  Newman  had  the  brain  of  a  good-sized  rabbit.     But 

*  Vide  supra,  p.  35. 

f  "  I  reckon  him  the  remarkablest  Pontiff  that  has  darkened 
God's  daylight.  .  .  .  Here  is  a  Supreme  Priest  who  believes 
God  to  be — what,  in  the  name  of  God,  does  he  believe  God  to 
be? — and  discerns  that  all  worship  of  God  is  a  scenic  phantas- 
magoryof  wax-candles,  organ-blasts,  Gregorian  chants,  mass- 
brayings,  purple  monsignori,  etc."  ("Past  and  Present," 
Book  iii.,  chap.  i.). 


382  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

in  this  matter  of  collectivism  versus  individualism, 
Carlyle  was  with  the  Middle  Ages.  "For  those  were 
rugged,  stalwart  ages.  .  .  .  Gurth,  born  thrall  of  Cedric, 
it  is  like,  got  cuffs  as  often  as  pork-parings;  but  Gurth 
did  belong  to  Cedric;  no  human  creature  then  went 
about  connected  with  nobody;  left  to  go  his  way  into 
Bastilles  or  worse,  under  Laissez-jaire.  .  .  .  That  Feudal 
Aristocracy,  I  say,  was  no  imaginary  one.  ...  It  was  a 
Land  Aristocracy;  it  managed  the  Governing  of  this 
English  People,  and  had  the  reaping  of  the  Soil  of  Eng- 
land in  return.  .  .  .  Soldiering,  Police  and  Judging, 
Church-Extension,  nay,  real  Government  and  Guidance, 
all  this  was  actually  done  by  the  Holders  of  Land  in  re- 
turn for  their  Land.  How  much  of  it  is  now  done  by 
them;  done  by  anybody  ?  Good  Heavens!  ' Laissez Jaire, 
Do  ye  nothing,  eat  your  wages  and  sleep/  is  everywhere 
the  passionate  half-wise  cry  of  this  time."  * 

From  1850  onwards,  in  which  year  Ruskin  made  Car- 
lyle's  acquaintance,  the  former  fell  under  the  dominion  of 
these  ideas,  and  began  to  preach  a  species  of  Aristocratic 
Socialism. f  He  denounced  competition  and  profit-seek- 
ing in  commerce;  the  factory  system;  the  capitalistic 
organisation  of  industry.  His  scheme  of  a  regenerated 
society,  however,  was  by  no  means  so  democratic  as  that 
imagined  by  Morris  in  "  News  from  Nowhere."  It  was  a 
"new  feudalism"  with  a  king  at  the  head  of  it  and  a 
rural  nobility  of  "the  great  old  families,"  whose  relations 
to  their  tenantry  are  not  very  clearly  defined.  J     Ruskin 

*  1  bid. ,  Book  iv. ,  chap.  i. 

f  With  Morris,  too,  when  an  Oxford  undergraduate,  "  Car- 
lyle's  '  Past  and  Present, '  "  says  his  biographer,  "stood  along- 
side of  '  Modern  Painters  '  as  inspired  and  absolute  truth. " 

%  For  a  systematic  exposition  of  Ruskin 's  social  and  politi- 


Tendencies  and  Results.  383 

took  some  steps  towards  putting  into  practice  his  plans 
for  a  reorganisation  of  labour  under  improved  conditions. 
"  Fors  Clavigera  "  consisted  of  a  series  of  letters  to  work- 
ingmen,  inviting  them  to  join  him  in  establishing  a  fund 
for  rescuing  English  country  life  from  the  tyranny  and 
defilement  of  machinery.  In  pursuance  of  this  project, 
the  St.  George's  Guild  was  formed,  about  1870,  Ruskin 
devoting  to  it  ,£7,000  of  his  own  money.  Trustees  were 
chosen  to  administer  the  fund;  a  building  was  bought  at 
Walkley,  in  the  suburbs  of  Sheffield,  for  use  as  a  mu- 
seum ;  and  the  money  subscribed  was  employed  in  pro- 
moting co-operative  experiments  in  agriculture,  manufac- 
turing, and  education. 

In  1848  the  widespread  misery  among  the  English 
working  class,  both  agricultural  labourers  and  the  opera- 
tives in  cities,  broke  out  in  a  startling  way  in  the  Chart- 
ist movement.  Sympathy  with  some  of  the  aims  of  this 
movement  found  literary  expression  in  Charles  Kings- 
ley's  novels,  "  Yeast "  and  "  Alton  Locke  " ;  in  his  widely 
circulated  tract,  "  Cheap  Clothes  and  Nasty  " ;  in  his  let- 
ters in  Politics  jor  the  People  over  the  signature  "  Parson 
Lot " ;  in  some  of  his  ballads  like  "  The  Three  Fishers  " ; 
and  in  the  writings  of  his  friends,  F.  D.  Maurice  and 
Thomas  Hughes.  But  the  Christian  Socialism  of  these 
Broad  Churchmen  was  by  no  means  of  the  mediaeval  type. 
Kingsley  was  an  exponent  of  "  Muscular  Christianity." 
He  hated  the  asceticism  and  sacerdotalism  of  the  Oxford 
set,  and  challenged  the  Tractarian  movement  with  all 
his  might.*     Neither  was  this  Christian  Socialism  of  a 

cal  philosophy,  the  reader  should  consult  "John  Ruskin,  So- 
cial Reformer,"  by  J.  A.  Hobson,  London,   1898. 
*  Vide  supra,  pp.  279,  280. 


384  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

radical  nature,  like  Morris'.  It  limited  itself  to  an  en- 
deavour to  alleviate  distress  by  an  appeal  to  the  good 
feeling  of  the  upper  classes;  and  by  setting  on  foot  trade- 
unions,  co-operative  societies,  and  workingmen's  col- 
leges. Kingsley  himself,  like  Ruskin,  believed  in  a 
landed  gentry;  and  like  both  Ruskin  and  Carlyle,  he 
defended  Governor  Eyre  of  Jamaica  against  the  attacks 
of  the  radical  press.* 

Ruskin  and  Morris  travelled  to  Socialism  by  the  path- 
way of  art.  Carlyle  had  early  begun  his  complaints 
against  the  mechanical  spirit  of  the  age,  and  its  too  great 
reliance  on  machinery  in  all  departments  of  thought  and 
life.f  But  Ruskin  made  war  on  machinery  for  different 
reasons.  As  a  lover  of  the  beautiful,  he  hated  its  ugly 
processes  and  products.  As  a  student  of  art,  he  mourned 
over  the  reduction  of  the  handicraftsman  to  a  slave 
of  the  machine.  Factories  had  poisoned  the  English 
sky  with  their  smoke,  and  blackened  English  soil 
and  polluted  English  rivers  with  their  refuse.  The  rail-' 
road  had  spoiled  Venice  and  vulgarised  Switzerland. 
He  would  like  to  tear  up  all  the  railroads  in  Wales  and 
most  of  those  in  England,  and  pull  down  the  city  of  New 
York.  He  could  not  live  in  America  two  months— a 
country  without  castles.  Modern  architecture,  modern 
dress,  modern  manufactures,  modern  civilisation,  were 
all  utterly  hideous.  Worst  of  all  was  the  effect  on  the 
workman,  condemned  by  competitive  commercialism  to 
turn  out  cheap  goods;  condemned  by  division  of  labour 
to  spend  his  life  in  making  the  eighteenth  part  of  a  pin. 

♦For  a  number  of    years,  beginning  with    1854,   Ruskin 
taught  drawing  classes  in  Maurice's  Working  Man's  College. 
fSee  "Characteristics"  and  "Signs  of  the  Times." 


Tendencies  and  %esults.  385 

Work  without  art,  said  Ruskin,  is  brutalising.  To  take 
pleasure  in  his  work,  said  Morris,  is  the  workman's  best 
inducement  to  labour  and  his  truest  reward.  In  the 
Middle  Ages  every  artisan  was  an  artist;  the  art  of  the 
Middle  Ages  was  popular  art.  Now  that  the  designer 
and  the  handicraftsman  are  separate  persons,  the  work  of 
the  former  is  unreal,  and  of  the  latter  merely  mechanical. 
This  point  of  view  is  eloquently  stated  in  that  chapter 
on  "The  Nature  of  Gothic"  in  "The  Stones  of  Venice," 
which  made  so  deep  an  impression  on  Morris  when  he 
was  in  residence  at  Oxford.*  "  It  is  verily  this  degra- 
dation of  the  operative  into  a  machine  which,  more  than 
any  other  evil  of  the  times,  is  leading  the  mass  of  the 
nations  everywhere  into  vain,  incoherent,  destructive 
struggling  for  a  freedom  of  which  they  cannot  explain  the 
nature  to  themselves.  Their  universal  outcry  against 
wealth  and  against  nobility  is  not  forced  from  them 
either  by  the  pressure  of  famine  or  the  sting  of  mortified 
pride.  These  do  much,  and  have  done  much  in  all  ages ; 
but  the  foundations  of  society  were  never  yet  shaken  as 
they  are  at  this  day.  It^is  not  that  men  are  ill-fed,  but 
that  they  have  no  pleasure  in  the  work  by  which  they 
make  their  bread,  and  therefore  look  to  wealth  as  the 
only  means  of  pleasure.  It  is  not  that  men  are  pained 
by  the  scorn  of  the  upper  classes,  but  they  cannot  endure 
their  own;  for  they  feel  that  the  kind  of  labour  to  which 
they  are  condemned  is  verily  a  degrading  one,  and  makes 
them  less  than  men.  .  .  .  We  have  much  studied  and 
much  perfected,  of  late,  the  great  civilised  invention  of 
the  division  of  labour;  only  we  give  it  a  false  name. 
It  is  not,  truly  speaking,  the  labour  that  is  divided;  but 
*  Vide  supra,  p.  321. 


YA 


386  zA  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

the  men — divided  into  mere  segments  of  men — broken 
into  small  fragments  and  crumbs  of  life,  so  that  all  the 
little  piece  of  intelligence  that  is  left  in  a  man  is  not 
enough  to  make  a  pin,  or  a  nail,  but  exhausts  itself  in 
making  the  point  of  a  pin,  or  the  head  of  a  nail.  .  .  . 
And  the  great  cry  that  rises  from  all  our  manufacturing 
cities,  louder  than  their  furnace  blast,  is  all,  in  very 
deed,  for  this — that  we  manufacture  everything  there  ex- 
cept men.  .  .  .  And  all  the  evil  to  which  that  cry  is  urg- 
ing our  myriads  can  be  met  only  .  .  .  by  a  right  under- 
standing, on  the  part  of  all  classes,  of  what  kinds  of 
labour  are  good  for  men,  raising  them,  and  making  them 
happy;  by  a  determined  sacrifice  of  such  convenience,  or 
beauty,  or  cheapness  as  is  to  be  got  only  by  the  degrada- 
tion of  the  workman."  * 

Morris*  contributions  to  the  literature  of  Socialism  in- 
clude, besides  his  romance,  "News  from  Nowhere,"  two 
volumes  of  verse,  "Poems  by  the  Way"  (i89i)and  "The 
Dream  of  John  Ball";  together  with  "Socialism:  Its 
Growth  and  Outcome"  (1893),  an  historical  sketch  of 
the  subject  written  in  collaboration  with  Mr.  E.  Belfort 
Bax.  Mackail  also  describes  a  satirical  interlude,  en- 
titled "The  Tables  Turned,  or  Nupkins  Awakened," 
which  was  acted  thrice  at  Farringden  Road  in  the  au- 
tumn of  1887 — a  Socialistic  farce  in  the  form  of  a  medi- 
aeval miracle  play — a  conjunction  quite  typical  of  the 
playwright's  political  principles  and  literary  preferences. 
Morris'  ideal  society,  unlike  Ruskin's,  included  no  feudal 
elements;  there  was  no  room  in  it  for  kings,  or  nobles, 
or  great  cities,  or  a  centralised  government.     It  was  prim- 

*Vol.  ii.,  chap,  vi.,  §§  xv.,  xvi.  Morris  reprinted  the 
whole  chapter  on  the  Kelmscott  Press. 


Tendencies  and  Results.  387 

itive  Teutonic  rather  than  mediaeval;  resembling  the 
communal  type  described  in  "  The  House  of  the  Wolf- 
ings."  There  were  to  be  no  more  classes — no  rich  or 
poor.  To  ordinary  Socialists  the  reform  means  a  fairer 
distribution  of  the  joint  product  of  capital  and  labour; 
higher  wages  for  the  workingman,  shorter  hours,  better 
food  and  more  of  it,  better  clothes,  better  houses,  more 
amusements — in  short,  "  beer  and  skittles  "  in  reasonable 
amount.  The  Socialism  of  Ruskin  and  Morris  was  an 
outcome  of  their  aesthetic  feeling.  They  liked  to  imag- 
ine the  work  people  of  the  future  as  an  intelligent  and 
artistic  body  of  handicraftsmen,  living  in  pretty  Gothic 
cottages  among  gardens  of  their  own,  scattered  all  over 
England  in  small  rural  towns  or  villages,  and  joyfully 
engaged  in  making  sound  and  beautiful  objects  of  use, 
tools,  furniture,  woven  goods,  etc.  To  the  followers  of 
Mr.  Hyndman  these  motives,  if  not  these  aims,  must  have 
seemed  somewhat  unpractical.  And  in  reading  "Fors 
Clavigera,"  one  sometimes  has  a  difficulty  in  understand- 
ing just  what  sort  of  person  Ruskin  imagined  the  British 
workman  to  be. 

The  Neo-Romanticists.— The  literature  of  each  new 
generation  is  apt  to  be  partly  an  imitation  of  the  last, 
and  partly  a  reaction  against  it.  The  impulse  first 
given  by  Rossetti  was  communicated,  through  Mor- 
ris and  Swinburne,  to  a  group  of  younger  poets  whom 
Mr.  Stedman  distinguishes  as  "  Neo-Romanticists."  * 
The  most  noteworthy  among  these  are  probably  Arthur 
0'Shaughnessy,f    John    Payne,  J    and    The'ophile    Mar- 

♦"Victorian  Poets,"  chap,  vii.,  §  vi. 

f"An  Epic  of  Women"  (1870)  ;  "Lays  of  France"  (1872)  ; 

"  Music  and  Moonlight "  (1874);  "  Songs  of  a  Worker  "  (1881). 

J" A  Masque  of  Shadows"     (1870):    "Intaglios"    (1871)  ; 


388  eA  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

zials ;  *  though  mention  (want  of  space  forbids  more) 
should  also  be  made  of  George  Augustus  Simcox,  whose 
"  Poems  and  Romances  "  (1869)  are  in  the  Pre-Raphael- 
ite tradition.  The  work  of  each  of  these  has  pronounced 
individuality;  yet,  as  a  whole,  it  reminds  one  continually 
now  of  Rossetti,  now  of  Morris,  and  again  of  Swinburne; 
not  infrequently,  too,  of  Keats  or  Leigh  Hunt;  but  never 
of  the  older  romanticism,  never  of  Scott  nor  even  of 
Coleridge  or  Tennyson.  The  reminder  comes  sometimes 
through  a  turn  of  phrase  or  the  trick  of  the  verse ;  but  more 
insistently  in  the  choice  of  subject  and  the  entire  attitude 
of  the  poet  towards  art  and  life,  an  attitude  that  may  be 
vaguely  described  as  "aesthetic."  Even  more  distinctly 
than  in  Swinburne,  English  romanticism  in  these  latest 
representatives  is  seen  to  be  taking  a  French  direction. 
They  show  the  influence  not  only  of  Hugo  and  Gautier, 
but  of  those  more  recent  schools  of  "  decadents  "  which 
exhibit  French  romanticism  in  its  deliquescent  stage; 
writers  like  Theodore  de  Banville  and  Charles  Baude- 
laire; books  like  Aloysius  Bertrand's  "Gaspard  de  la 
Nuit."  Morbid  states  of  passion ;  the  hectic  bloom  of 
fever;  heady  perfumes  of  the  Orient  and  the  tropics; 
the  bitter-sweet  blossom  of  love ;  forced  fruits  of  the  hot- 
house (serres  chaudes) ;  the  iridescence  of  standing  pools ; 
the  fungoidal  growths  of  decay;  such  are  some  of  the 
hackneyed  metaphors  which  render  the  impression  of 
this  neo-romantic  poetry. 

Marzials   was   born    at   Brussels,  of  French  parents. 
His  "  Gallery  of  Pigeons "  is  inscribed  to  the  modern 

"Songs of  Life  and  Death"  (1872)  ;  "Lautrec"  (1878)  ;  "New 
Poems"  (1880). 
*"A  Gallery  of  Pigeons"  (1873). 


Tendencies  and  Results.  389 

Provencal  poet  Aubanel,  and  introduced  by  a  French 
sonnet.  O'Shaughnessy  "  was  half  a  Frenchman  in  his 
love  for,  and  mastery  of,  the  French  language  " ;  *  and 
on  his  frequent  visits  to  Paris,  made  close  acquaintance 
with  Victor  Hugo  and  the  younger  school  of  French 
poets.  O'Shaughnessy  and  Payne  were  intimate  friends, 
and  dedicated  their  first  books  to  each  other.  In  1870-72 
they  were  members  of  the  literary  circle  that  assembled 
at  the  house  of  Ford  Madox  Brown,  and  there  they  met 
the  Rossettis,  Morris,  Swinburne,  and  William  Bell 
Scott.  O'Shaughnessy  emerges  most  distinctly  from  the 
group  by  reason  of  his  very  original  and  exquisite  lyrical 
gift — a  gift  not  fully  recognised  till  Mr.  Palgrave  ac- 
corded him,  in  the  second  series  of  his  "  Golden  Treas- 
ury" (1897),  a  greater  number  of  selections  than  any 
Victorian  poet  but  Tennyson:  a  larger  space  than  he 
gave  either  to  Browning  or  Rossetti  or  Matthew  Arnold.f 
Comparatively  little  of  O'Shaughnessy's  work  belongs  to 
the  department  of  mediaeval -romantic.  His  "Lays  of 
France,"  five  in  number,  are  founded  upon  the  lais  of 

♦"Arthur  O'Shaughnessy."  By  Louise  Chandler-Moulton, 
Cambridge  and  Chicago,  1894. 

f  Swinburne,  as  a  living  author,  is  not  represented  in  the 
"Treasury."  O'Shaughnessy's  metrical  originality  is  un- 
doubted. But  one  of  his  finest  lyrics,  "The  Fountain  of 
Tears,"  has  an  echo  of  Baudelaire's  American  master,  Edgar 
Poe,  as  well  as  of  Swinburne ; 

"  Very  peaceful  the  place  is,  and  solely 
For  piteous  lamenting  and  sighing, 
And  those  who  come  living  or  dying 

Alike  from  their  hopes  and  their  fears : 
Full  of  cypress-like  shadows  the  place  is, 
And  statues  that  cover  their  faces  ; 

But  out  of  the  gloom  springs  the  holy 

And  beautiful  Fountain  of  Tears." 


39 o  *A  History  of  English  Itymanticism. 

Marie  de  France,  the  Norman  poetess  of  the  thirteenth 
century  whose  little  fable,  "  Du  coq  et  du  werpil,"  Chau- 
cer expanded  into  his  "  Nonne  Prestes  Tale."  O'Shaugh- 
nessy's  versions  are  not  so  much  paraphrases  as  in- 
dependent poems,  following  Marie's  stories  merely  in 
outline. 

The  verse  is  the  eight-syllabled  couplet  with  variations 
and  alternate  riming;  the  style  follows  the  graceful, 
fluent  simplicity  of  the  Old  French ;  and  in  its  softly 
articulated,  bright-coloured  prolixity,  the  narrative  fre- 
quently suggests  "  The  Earthly  Paradise  "  or  "  The  Story 
of  Rimini."  The  most  remarkable  of  these  pieces  is 
"  Chaitivel,"  in  which  the  body  of  a  bride  is  carried  away 
by  a  dead  lover,  while  another  dead  lover  comes  back 
from  his  grave  in  Palestine  and  fights  with  the  bride- 
groom for  possession  of  her  soul.  The  song  which  the 
lady  sings  to  the  buried  man  is  true  to  that  strange  medi- 
aeval materialism,  the  cleaving  of  "soul's  love"  to 
"body's  love,"  the  tenderness  intense  that  pierces  the 
"wormy  circumstance"  of  the  tomb,  and  refuses  to  let 
the  dead  be  dead,  which  was  noted  in  Keats'  "  Isabella  " : 

"  Hath  any  loved  you  well,  down  there, 
Summer  or  winter  through  ? 
Down  there,  have  you  found  any  fair 

Laid  in  the  grave  with  you  ? 
Is  death's  long  kiss  a  richer  kiss 
Than  mine  was  wont  to  be — 
Or  have  you  gone  to  some  far  bliss 
And  quite  forgotten  me  ?  " 

Of  similar  inspiration,  but  more  pictorially  and  exter- 
nally Gothic,  are  such  tales  as  "The  Building  of  the 
Dream"  and  "Sir  Floris"  in  Payne's  volume,  "The 
Masque  of  Shadows."     The  former  of  these,  introduced 


Tendencies  and  "Results.  391 

by  a  quotation  from  Jehan  du  Mestre,  is  the  history  of  a 
certain  squire  of  Poitou,  who  devotes  himself  to  necro- 
mancy and  discovers  a  spell  in  an  old  Greek  manuscript, 
whereby,  having  shod  his  horse  with  gold  and  ridden 
seven  days  into  the  west,  he  comes  to  the  enchanted  land 
of  Dame  Venus  and  dwells  with  her  a  season.  But  the 
bliss  is  insupportable  by  a  mortal,  and  he  returns  to  his 
home  and  dies.  The  poem  has  analogies  with  "The 
Earthly  Paradise"  and  the  Tannhauser  legend.  The 
ancient  city  of  Poitou,  where  the  action  begins,  is  elabo- 
rately described,  with  its  "  lazy  grace  of  old  romance  " : 

"  Fair  was  the  place  and  old 
Beyond  the  memory  of  man,  with  roofs 

Tall-peak 'd  and  hung  with  woofs 
Of  dainty  stone- work,  jewell 'd  with  the  grace 

Of  casements,  in  the  face 
Of  the  white  gables  inlaid,  in  all  hues 

Of  lovely  reds  and  blues. 
At  every  corner  of  the  winding  ways 

A  carven  saint  did  gaze, 
With  mild  sweet  eyes,  upon  the  quiet  town, 

From  niche  and  shrine  of  brown  ; 
And  many  an  angel,  graven  for  a  charm 

To  save  the  folk  from  harm 
Of  evil  sprites,  stood  sentinel  above 

High  pinnacle  and  roof." 

"  Sir  Floris  "  is  an  allegorical  romaunt  founded  on  a  pas- 
sage in  "LeViolier  des  Histoires  Provenciaux."  The 
dedication,  to  the  author  of  "  Lohengrin,"  praises  Wolf- 
ram von  Eschenbach,  the  poet  of  "  Parzival,"  as  "  the 
sweetest  of  all  bards."  Sir  Floris,  obeying  a  voice  heard 
in  sleep,  followed  a  white  dove  to  an  enchanted  garden, 
where  he  slew  seven  monsters,  symbolic  of  the  seven 
deadly  sins;  from  whose  blood  sprang  up  the  lily  of 
chastity,  the  rose  of  love,  the  violet  of  humility,  the 
clematis  of  content,  the  marigold  of  largesse,  the  mystic 


392  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

marguerite,  and  the  holy  vervain  "that  purgeth  earth's 
desire."  Sir  Galahad  then  carries  him  in  a  magic  boat 
to  the  Orient  city  of  Sarras,  where  the  Grail  is  enshrined 
and  guarded  by  a  company  of  virgin  knights,  Percival, 
Lohengrin,  Titurel,  and  Bors.  Sir  Floris  sees  the  sacred 
chalice — a  single  emerald — lays  his  nosegay  upon  the 
altar,  witnesses  the  mystery  of  the  eucharist,  and  is  kissed 
upon  the  mouth  by  Christ.  This  poet  is  fond  of  intro- 
ducing old  French  words  "  to  make  his  English  sweet  upon 
his  tongue "  ;  accueillade,  valiantise,  faineant,  allegresse, 
gentiles se,  forte  et  dure,  and  occasionally  a  phrase  like  dieu 
vous  doint  felicite.  Payne's  ballads  are  less  characteris- 
tic* Perhaps  the  most  successful  of  them  is  "The 
Rime  of  Redemption  " — in  "  The  Masque  of  Shadows  " 
volume.  Sir  Loibich's  love  has  died  in  her  sins,  and  he 
sits  by  the  fire  in  bitter  repentance.  He  hears  the  voice 
of  her  spirit  outside  in  the  moonlight,  and  together  they 
ride  through  the  night  on  a  black  steed,  first  to  Fairy- 
land, then  to  Purgatory,  and  then  to  the  gate  of  Heaven. 
Each  of  these  in  turn  is  offered  him,  but  he  rejects  them 

all— 

"  With  thee  in  hell,  I  choose  to  dwell " — 

and  thereby  works  her  redemption.  The  wild  night  ride 
has  an  obvious  resemblance  to  "  Lenore  " : 

"The  wind  screams  past ;  they  ride  so  fast, 
Like  troops  of  souls  in  pain 
The  snowdrifts  spin,  but  none  may  win 
To  rest  upon  the  twain. " 

Very  different  from  these,  and  indeed  with  no  pretensions 

*See  especially  "Sir  Erwin's  Questing,"  "The  Ballad  of 
May  Margaret,"  "The  Westward  Sailing,"  and  "The  Ballad 
of  the  King's  Daughter  "  in  "Songs  of  Life  and  Death." 


Tendencies  and  %esults.  393 

to  the  formal  peculiarities  of  popular  minstrelsy,  is 
O'Shaughnessy's  weird  ballad  "  Bisclaveret,"  *  suggested 
by  the  superstition  concerning  were-wolves: 

"  The  splendid  fearful  herds  that  stray 
By  midnight  " — 
"The  multitudinous  campaign 
Of  hosts  not  yet  made  fast  in  Hell. " 

Bisclaveret  is  the  Breton  word  for  loup  garou ;  and  the 
poem  is  headed  with  a  caption  to  this  effect  from  the 
"  Lais  "  of  Marie.  The  wild,  mystical  beauty  of  which 
the  Celtic  imagination  holds  the  secret  is  visible  in  this 
lyrist ;  but  it  would  perhaps  be  going  too  far  to  attribute 
his  interest  in  the  work  of  Marie  de  France  to  a  native 
sympathy  with  the  song  spirit  of  that  other  great  branch 
of  the  Celtic  race,  the  ancient  Cymry. 

Payne's  volume  of  sonnets,  "  Intaglios "  (a  title  per- 
haps prompted  by  the  chiselled  workmanship  of  Gautier's 
"  Emaux  et  Camees ")  bears  the  clearest  marks  of  Ros- 
setti's  influence — or  of  the  influence  of  Dante  through 
Rossetti.  The  inscription  poem  is  to  Dante,  and  the 
series  named  "  Madonna  dei  Sogni "  is  particularly  full 
of  the  imagery  and  sentiment  of  the  "  Purgatorio  "  and 
the  "  Vita  Nuova."  Several  of  the  sonnets  in  the  collec- 
tion are  written  for  pictures,  like  Rossetti's.  Two  are 
on  Spenserian  subjects,  "  Belphcebe  "  and  "  The  Garden 
of  Adonis";  and  one,  "Bride-Night"  is  suggested  by 
Wagner's  "Tristram  und  Isolde."  Payne's  work  as  a 
translator  is  of  importance,  and  includes  versions  of  the 
"Decameron,"  "The  Thousand  and  One  Nights,"  and 
the  poems  of  Francois  Villon,  all  made  for  the  Villon 
Society. 

*In  "An  Epic  of  Women." 

\ 


394  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

Jewels  and  flowers  are  set  thickly  enough  in  the  pages 
of  all  this  school ;  but  it  is  in  The'ophile  Marzials'  singu- 
lar, yet  very  attractive,  verses  that  the  luxurious  colour 
in  which  romance  delights,  and  the  decorative  features 
of  Pre-Raphaelite  art  run  into  the  most  bizarre  excesses. 
He  wantons  in  dainty  affectations  of  speech  and  eccen- 
tricities of  phantasy.  Here  we  find  again  the  orchard 
closes,  the  pleached  pleasances,  and  all  those  queer  pic- 
ture paradises,  peopled  with  tall  lilied  maidens,  angels 
with  peacock  wings  and  thin  gold  hoops  above  their  heads, 
and  court  minstrels  thrumming  lutes,  rebecks,  and  man- 
dolins— 

"I  dreamed  I  was  a  virginal — 
The  gilt  one  of  Saint  Cecily's." 

The  book  abounds  in  nocturnes,  arabesques,  masquerades, 
bagatelles,  rococo  pastorals.  The  lady  in  "  The  Gallery 
of  Pigeons  "  sits  at  her  broidery  frame  and  works  tapes- 
tries for  her  walls.  At  night  she  sleeps  in  the  northern 
tower  where 

"Above  all  tracery,  carven  flower. 
And  grim  gurgoil  is  her  bower-window  "  ; 

and  higher  up  a  griffin  clings  against  a  cornice, 

"And  gnashes  and  grins  in  the  green  moonlight," 

and  higher  still,  the  banderolle  flutters 

"At  the  top  of  the  thinnest  pinnacle  peak." 

In  a  Pre-Raphaelite  heaven  the  maidens  sit  in  the  blessed 
mother's  chamber  and  spin  garments  for  the  souls  in 
Limbo,  or  press  sweet  wine  for  the  sacrament,  or  illu- 
minate missals  with  quaint  phantasies.  Mr.  Stedman 
quotes  a  few  lines  which  he  says  have  the  air  of  parody: 


Tendencies  and  Results.  395 

"They  chase  them  each,  below,  above, — 
Half  madden 'd  by  their  minstrelsy, — 

Thro'  garths  of  crimson  gladioles  ; 
And,  shimmering  soft  like  damoisels, 
The  angels  swarm  in  glimmering  shoals, 

And  pin  them  to  their  aureoles, 
And  mimick  back  their  ritournels." 

This  reads,  indeed,  hardly  less  like  a  travesty  than  the 
well-known  verses  in  Punch : 

"Glad  lady  mine,  that  glitterest 

In  shimmer  of  summer  athwart  the  lawn ; 
Canst  tell  me  whether  is  bitterest, 
The  glamour  of  eve,  or  the  glimmer  of  dawn  ?  " 

This  stained-glass  imagery  was  so  easy  to  copy  that,  be- 
fore long,  citoles  and  damoisels  and  aureoles  and  garths 
and  glamours  and  all  the  rest  of  the  picturesque  furniture 
grew  to  be  a  burden.  The  artistic  movement  had  invaded 
dress  and  upholstery,  and  Pre-Raphaelitism  tapered  down 
into  aestheticism,  domestic  art,  and  the  wearing  of  sun- 
flowers. Du  Maurier  became  its  satirist;  Bunthorn  and 
Postlethwaite  presented  it  to  the  philistine  understanding 
in  a  grotesque  mixture  of  caricature  and  quackery. 

The  Reaction. — Literary  epochs  overlap  at  the  edges, 
and  contrasting  literary  modes  coexist.  There  was  some 
romantic  poetry  written  in  Pope's  time ;  and  in  the  very 
heat  and  fury  of  romantic  predominance,  Landor  kept  a 
cool  chamber  apart,  where  incense  was  burned  to  the 
ancient  gods.*     But  it  is  the  master  current  which  gives 

*  "  From  time  to  time  bright  spirits,  intolerant  of  the  tradi- 
tional, try  to  alter  the  bournes  of  time  and  space  in  these  re- 
spects, and  to  make  out  that  the  classical,  whatever  the  fail- 
ings on  its  part,  was  always  in  its  heart  rather  Romantic,  and 
that  the  Romantic  has  always,  at  its  best,  been  just  a  little 
classical.  .  .  .  But  such  observations  are  only  of  use  as  guards 
against  a  too  wooden  and  matter-of-fact  classification ;  the 


396  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism, 

tinge  and  direction  to  lesser  confluents;  and  romanti- 
cism may  be  said  to  have  had  everything  its  own  way 
down  to  the  middle  of  the  century.  Then  reaction  set  in 
and  the  stream  of  romantic  tendency  ceased  to  spread 
itself  over  the  whole  literary  territory,  but  flowed  on  in 
the  narrower  and  deeper  channels  of  Pre-Raphaelitism 
and  its  allied  movements.  This  reaction  expressed  itself 
in  different  ways,  of  which  it  will  be  sufficient  here  to 
mention  three:  realistic  fiction,  classical  criticism,  and 
the  Queen  Anne  revival. 

The  leading  literary  form  of  the  past  fifty  years  has 
been  the  novel  of  real  life.  The  failure  of  "Les  Bur- 
graves"  in  1843  not  more  surely  signalised  the  end  of 
French  romanticism,  than  the  appearance  of  "Vanity 
Fair"  in  1848  announced  that  in  England,  too,  the  reign 
of  romance  was  over.  Classicism  had  given  way  before 
romanticismnand  now  romanticism  in  turn  was  yielding 
to  realism.  !?Realism  sets  itself  against  that  desire  of 
escape  from  actual  conditions  into  an  ideal  world,  which 
is  a  note  of  the  romantic  spirit  in  general;  and  conse- 
quently it  refuses  to  find  the  past  any  more  interesting 
than  the  present,  and  has  no  use  for  the  Middle  Ages. 
The  temperature,  too,  had  cooled ;  not  quite  down  to  the 
Augustan  grade,  yet  to  a  point  considerably  below  the 
fever  heat  registered  by  the  emotional  thermometer  of 
the  late  Georgian  era.  Byron's  contemporaries  were 
shocked  by  his  wickedness  and  dazzled  by  his  genius. 
They  remonstrated  admiringly  with  him;  young  ladies 
wept  over  his  poetry  and  prayed  for  the  poet's  conver- 

great  general  differences  of  the  periods  remain,  and  can  never 
be  removed  in  imagination  without  loss  and  confusion  "  ("A 
Short  History  of  English  Literature,"  Saintsbury,  p.  724). 


Tendencies  and  Results.  397 

sion.  But  young  university  men  of  Thackeray's  time 
discovered  that  Byron  was  a  poseur  ;  Thackeray  himself 
describes  him  as  "  a  big,  sulky  dandy."  "  The  Sorrows 
of  Werther,"  which  made  people  cry  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  made  Thackeray  laugh;  and  he  summed  it  up 
in  a  doggerel  ballad : 

"Charlotte  was  a  married  woman 
And  a  moral  man  was  Werther, 
And  for  nothing  in  creation 

Would  do  anything  to  hurt  her. " 


"  Charlotte,  having  seen  his  body 

Borne  before  her  on  a  shutter, 
Like  a  well-conducted  woman. 

Went  on  cutting  bread  and  butter." 

Mr.  Howells  in  Venice  sneers  at  Byron's  theatrical 
habit  of  riding  horesback  on  the  Lido  in  "  conspicuous 
solitude,"  as  recorded  in  "Julian  and  Maddalo."  He 
notices  the  local  traditions  about  Byron — a  window  from 
which  one  of  his  mistresses  was  said  to  have  thrown 
herself  into  the  canal,  etc. — and  confesses  that  these 
matters  interest  him  very  little. 
f  As  to  the  Walter  Scott  kind  of  romance,  we  know  what 
Mr.  Howells  thinks  of  it;  and  have  read  "Rebecca  and 
Rowena,"  Thackeray's  travesty  of  "  Ivanhoe.'j  Thack- 
eray took  no  print  from  the  romantic  generation;  he 
passed  it  over,  and  went  back  to  Addison,  Fielding, 
Goldsmith,  Swift.  His  masters  were  the  English  hu- 
mourists of  the  eighteenth  century.  He  planned  a  lit- 
erary history  of  that  century,  a  design  which  was  carried 
out  on  other  lines  by  his  son-in-law,  Leslie  Stephen.  If 
he  wrote  historical  novels,  their  period  was  that  of  the 
Georges,  and  not  of  Richard  the  Lion  Heart.     It  will 


398  *A  History  of  English  ^Romanticism. 

not  do,  of  course,  to  lay  too  much  stress  on  Thackeray, 
whose  profession  was  satire  and  whose  temper  purely 
anti-romantic.  But  if  we  turn  to  the  leaders  of  the  mod- 
ern schools  of  fiction,  we  shall  find  that  some  of  them, 
like  George  Eliot  and  Anthony  Trollope,  are  even  more 
closely  realistic  than  Thackeray — who,  says  Mr.  Howells, 
is  a  caricaturist,  not  a  true  realist — and  of  others  such  as 
Dickens  and  Meredith,  we  shall  find  that,  in  whatever 
way  they  deviate  from  realism  as  strictly  understood,  it 
is  not  in  the  direction  of  romance. 

In  Matthew  Arnold's  critical  essays  we  meet  with  a 
restatement  of  classical  principles  and  an  application  of 
them  to  the  literature  of  the  last  generation.  There  was 
something  premature,  he  thinks,  about  the  burst  of  crea- 
tive activity  in  the  first  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
Byron  was  empty  of  matter,  Shelley  incoherent,  Words- 
worth wanting  in  completeness  and  variety.  He  finds 
much  to  commend  in  the  influence  of  a  literary  tribunal 
like  the  French  Academy,  which  embodies  that  ideal  of 
authority  so  dear  to  the  classical  heart.  Such  an  institu- 
tion acts  as  a  salutary  check  on  the  lawlessness,  eccen- 
tricity, self-will,  and  fantasticality  which  are  the  beset- 
ting intellectual  sins  of  Englishmen.  It  sets  the  standard 
and  gives  the  law.  "  Work  done  after  men  have  reached 
this  platform  is  classical;  and  that  is  the  only  work  which, 
in  the  long  run,  can  stand."  For  want  of  some  such 
organ  of  educated  opinion,  to  take  care  of  the  qualities  of 
order,  balance,  measure,  propriety,  correctness,  English 
men  of  genius  like  Ruskin  and  Carlyle,  in  their  national 
impatience  of  prescription  and  routine,  run  on  into  all 
manner  of  violence,  freak,  and  extravagance. 

Again,  in  the  preface  of  the  1853  edition  of  his  poems, 


Tendencies  and  eI{esults.  399 

Arnold  asserts  the  superiority  of  the  Greek  theory  of 
poetry  to  the  modern.  "  They  regarded  the  whole ;  we 
regard  the  parts.  With  them  the  action  predominated 
over  the  expression  of  it;  with  us  the  expression  predom- 
inates over  the  action.  .  .  .  We  have  poems  which  seem 
to  exist  merely  for  the  sake  of  single  lines  and  passages; 
not  for  the  sake  of  producing  any  total  impression." 

"  Faust "  itself,  judged  as  a  whole,  is  defective.  Fail- 
ing a  sure  guide,  in  the  confusion  of  the  present  times, 
the  wisest  course  for  the  young  writer  is  to  fix  his  atten- 
tion upon  the  best  models.  But  Shakspere  is  not  so  safe 
a  model  as  the  ancients.  He  has  not  their  purity  of 
method,  and  his  gift  of  expression  sometimes  leads  him 
astray.  "Mr.  Hallam,  than  whom  it  is  impossible  to 
find  a  saner  and  more  judicious  critic,  has  had  the  cour- 
age (for  at  the  present  day  it  needs  courage)  to  remark, 
how  extremely  and  faultily  difficult  Shakspere's  language 
often  is."  Half  a  century  easier  it  would  have  needed 
courage  to  question  Hallam's  /emark;  but  the  citation 
shows  how  thoroughly  Coleridge  and  Hazlitt  and  Lamb 
had  shifted  the  centre  of  orthodoxy  in  matters  of  Shak- 
sperian  criticism.  Now  the  presumption  was  against  any 
one  who  ventured  a  doubt  of  Shakspere's  impeccability. 
The  romantic  victory  was  complete.  "  But,  I  say,"  pur- 
sues the  essayist,  "  that  in  the  sincere  endeavour  to  learn 
and  practise  .  .  .  what  is  sound  and  true  in  poetical  art, 
I  seemed  to  myself  to  find  the  only  sure  guidance,  the 
only  solid  footing,  among  the  ancients."  All  this  has 
a  familiar  look  to  one  at  all  read  in  eighteenth-century 
criticism;  but  in  1853  it  sounds  very  much  like  heresy. 

As  an  instance  of  the  inferiority  of  romantic  to  classi- 
cal method  in  narrative  poetry,  Arnold  refers  to  Keats' 


400  *A  History  of  English  'Romanticism. 

"Isabella."*  "This  one  short  poem  contains,  perhaps, 
a  greater  number  of  happy  single  expressions  which  one 
could  quote  than  all  the  extant  tragedies  of  Sophocles. 
But  the  action,  the  story  ?  The  action  in  itself  is  an  ex- 
cellent one ;  but  so  feebly  is  it  conceived  by  the  poet, 
so  loosely  constructed,  that  the  effect  produced  by  it,  in 
and  for  itself,  is  absolutely  null.  Let  the  reader,  after 
he  has  finished  the  poem  of  Keats,  turn  to  the  same  story 
in  the  *  Decameron  ' ;  he  will  then  feel  how  pregnant  and 
interesting  the  same  action  has  become  in  the  hands  of  a 
great  artist  who,  above  all  things,  delineates  his  object; 
who  subordinates  expression  to  that  which  it  is  designed 
to  express." 

A  sentence  or  two  from  Arnold's  essay  on  Heinrich 
Heine,  and  we  may  leave  this  part  of  our  subject.  "  Mr. 
Carlyle  attaches,  it  seems  to  me,  far  too  much  importance 
to  the  romantic  school  of  Germany — Tieck,  Novalis,  Jean 
Paul  Richter.  .  .  .  The  mystic  and  romantic  school  of 
Germany  lost  itself  in  the  Middle  Ages,  was  overpowered 
by  their  influence,  came  to  ruin  by  its  vain  dreams  of 
renewing  them.  Heine,  with  a  far  profounder  sense  of 
the  mystic  and  romantic  charm  of  the  Middle  Age  than 
Gorres,  or  Brentano,  or  Arnim ;  Heine,  the  chief  romantic 
poet  of  Germany,  is  yet  also  much  more  than  a  romantic 
poet;  he  is  a  great  modern  poet,  he  is  not  conquered  by 
the  Middle  Age,  he  has  a  talisman  by  which  he  can  feel, 
along  with  but  above  the  power  of  the  fascinating  Mid- 
dle Age  itself,  the  power  of  modern  ideas." 

And,  finally,  the  oscillation  of  the  pendulum  has 
'  brought  us  back  again  for  a  moment  to  the  age  of  gayety, 
and  to  that  very  Queen  Anne  spirit  against  which  the 
* Vide  supra,  pp.  123-25. 


Tendencies  and  %esults.  401 

serious  and  sentimental  Thomson  began  the  revolt. 
There  is  not  only  at  present  a  renewed  appreciation  of 
what  was  admirable  in  the  verse  of  Pope  and  the  prose 
of  Swift,  but  we  discover  a  quaint  attractiveness  in  the 
artificiality  of  Augustan  manners,  dress,  and  speech. 
Lace  and  brocade,  powder  and  patch,  Dutch  gardens, 
Reynolds'  portraits,  Watteau  fans,  Dresden  china,  the 
sedan  chair,  the  spinet,  the  hoop-skirt,  the  talon  rouge — 
all  these  have  receded  so  far  into  the  perspective  as  to 
acquire  picturesqueness.  To  Scott's  generation  they 
seemed  eminently  modern  and  prosaic,  while  buff  jerkins 
and  coats  of  mail  were  poetically  remote.  But  so  the 
whirligig  of  time  brings  in  its  revenges,  and  the  old- 
fashioned,  as  distinguished  from  the  antique,  begins  to 
have  a  romanticness  of  its  own.  It  is  now  some  quarter 
century  since  people  took  to  building  Queen  Anne  cot- 
tages, and  gentlemen  at  costume  parties  to  treading 
minuets  in  small  clothes  and  perukes,  with  ladies  in  high- 
cushioned  hair  and  farthingales.  Girl  babies  in  large 
numbers  were  baptised  Dorothy  and  Belinda.  Book  illus- 
trators like  Kate  Green  away,  Edwin  Abbey,  and  Hugh 
Thomson  carried  the  mode  into  art.  The  date  of  the  Queen 
Anne  revival  in  literature  and  the  beginnings  of  the  bric-a- 
brac school  of  verse  are  marked  with  sufficient  precision  by 
the  publication  of  Austin  Dobson's  "  Vignettes  in  Rhyme  " 
(1873),  "Proverbs  in  Porcelain"  (1877),  and  the  other 
delightful  volumes  of  the  same  kind  that  have  followed. 
Mr.  Dobson  has  also  published,  in  prose,  lives  of  Steele, 
Fielding,  Hogarth,  and  Goldsmith  j  "  Eighteenth-Century 
Vignettes,"  and  the  like.  But  his  particular  ancestor 
among  the  Queen  Anne  wits  was  Matthew  Prior,  of  whose 
metrical  tales,  epigrams,  and  vers  dc  sociite  he  has  made 


402  *A  History  of  English  Romanticism. 

a  little  book  of  selections;  and  whose  gallantry,  light- 
ness, and  tone  of  persiflage,  just  dashed  with  sentiment,  he 
has  reproduced  with  admirable  spirit  in  his  own  original 
work. 

It  was  upon  the  question  of  Pope  that  romantics  and 
classics  first  joined  issue  in  the  time  of  Warton,  and  that 
the  critical  battle  was  fought  in  the  time  of  Bowles  and 
Byron;  the  question  of  his  real  place  in  literature,  and 
of  his  title  to  the  name  of  poet.  Mr.  Dobson  has  a  word 
to  say  for  Pope,  and  with  this  our  enquiries  may  fittingly 
end: 

"Suppose  you  say  your  Worst  of  POPE,  declare 
His  Jewels  Paste,  his  Nature  a  Parterre, 
His  Art  but  Artifice — I  ask  once  more 
Where  have  you  seen  such  artifice  before? 
Where  have  you  seen  a  Parterre  better  grac'd, 
Or  gems  that  glitter  like  his  Gems  of  Paste? 
Where  can  you  show,  among  your  Names  of  Note, 
So  much  to  copy  and  so  much  to  quote? 
And  where,  in  Fine,  in  all  our  English  Verse, 
A  Style  more  trenchant  and  a  Sense  more  terse?  " 

"So  I,  that  love  the  old  Augustan  Days 
Of  formal  courtesies  and  formal  Phrase  ; 
That  like  along  the  finish 'd  Line  to  feel 
The  Ruffle's  Flutter  and  the  Flash  of  Steel ; 
That  like  my  Couplet  as  Compact  as  Clear  ; 
That  like  my  Satire  sparkling  tho'  severe, 
Unmix' d  with  Bathos  and  unmarr'd  by  trope, 
I  fling  my  Cap  for  Polish— and  for  POPE  !  "  * 

But  ground  once  gained  in  a  literary  movement  is  never 
wholly  lost;  and  a  reversion  to  an  earlier  type  is  never 
complete.  The  classicism  of  Matthew  Arnold  is  not  at 
all  the  classicism  of  the  eighteenth  century;  Thackeray's 
realism  is  not  the  realism  of  Fielding.  It  is  what  it  is, 
partly  just  because  Walter  Scott  had  written  his  Wa- 
*"A  Dialogue  to  the  Memory  of  Mr.  Alexander  Pope." 


Tendencies  and  Insults.  403 

verley  Novels  in  the  mean  while.  Apart  from  the  works 
for  which  it  is  directly  responsible,  the  romantic  move- 
ment had  enriched  the  blood  of  the  literature,  and  its  re- 
sults are  seen  even  in  writings  hostile  to  the  romantic 
principles.  As  to  the  absolute  value  of  the  great  roman- 
tic output  of  the  nineteenth  century,  it  may  be  at  once 
acknowledged  that,  as  "  human  documents,"  books  which 
reflect  contemporary  life  have  a  superior  importance  to 
the  creations  of  the  modern  imagination,  playing  freely 
over  times  and  places  distant,  and  attractive  through 
their  distance;  over  ancient  Greece  or  the  Orient  or  the 
Middle  Age.  But  that  a  very  beautiful  and  quite  legiti- 
mate product  of  literary  art  may  spring  from  this  contact 
of  the  present  with  the  past,  it  is  hoped  that  our  history 
may  have  shown. 


THE    END. 


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Thorpe,  Benjamin.     "Northern  Mythology."     London,  18 51- 
52.     3  vols. 

"  Yuletide  Stories. "    London,  1875. 

Ticknor,  George.     "History  of  Spanish  Literature."     New 

York,  1849.     3  vols. 
Tieck,  J.  Ludwig.     "Phantasus."    Berlin,  1844-45.     2  vols. 

"Tales"  (trans.)  in  the  works  of  Thomas  Carlyle. 

2  vols.     London,  1869-72. 

Tighe,  Mary.     "Psyche,  with  Other  Poems."    London,  1812. 

Uhland,  J.  Ludwig.     Gedichte.     Stuttgart,  1875. 

Vere,  Aubrey  Thomas  de.     "Recollections."    London,  1897. 

Ward,   Wilfrid.     "William   George  Ward  and  the  Oxford 

Movement."    London,  1889. 
Watts,  Theodore.     "Rossetti."    Encyclopadia  Britannica. 
Wood,   Esther.     "Dante   Rossetti  and   the    Pre-Raphaelite 

Movement."     New  York,  1894. 
Wordsworth,   William.     Poetical  Works.     (Centenary  ed.) 

London,  1870.     6  vols. 

Yonge,  Charlotte  M.    "The  Heir  of  Redcliffe."    New  York, 
1871.     2  vols. 


INDEX 


Abbot,  The,  42 
Aben-Humeya,  246 
Addison,  Jos.,  95 
Adonais,  120 
Age  of  Wordsworth,  The,  12, 

24,  34,  87.  88 
Ahnung  und  Gegenwart,  147 
Alhambra,  The,  239 
Allemagne,    L',  139,   141-45. 

192,  208 
Allingham,    Wm.,    258,   300, 

304,  324 
Alonzo  the  Brave,  77,  83 
Alton  Locke,  383 
Amadis  of  Gaul,  236,  241 
Amber  Witch,  The,  42,  280 
Ancient  Mariner,  The,  48,  49, 

54,  74-80 
Ancient  Poetry  and  Romance 

of  Spain,  248 
Ancient  Spanish  Ballads,  239, 

247-49 
Anima  Poetse,  78 
Annales  Romantiques,  201 
Anthony,  198 

Antiquary,  The,  31,  33,  178 
Appreciations,  42 
Ariosto,    Lodovico,    91,    104, 

107,  109,  122 
Arme  Heinrich,  Der,  297 
Arnim,  Achim  von,  134,  138, 

155,  167,  192,  400 
Arnold,    Matthew,    255,  256, 

263,   274-76,   278,  280,    356, 

378,  398-400,  402 
Arthur's  Tomb,  305 


Aslauga's  Knight,  168 
Aspects  of  Poetry,  18 
At  Eleusis,  342 
Athenaeum,  The,  134 
Aucassin  et  Nicolete,  330 
Aue,  Hartmann  von,  297 
Aulnoy,  Comtesse  d',  194 
Austin,  Sarah,  162,  170 
Ave  atque  Vale.  349 

Bagehot,  Walter,  39 
Balin  and  Balan,  347,  348 
Ballad  of  a  Nun,  263,  264 
Ballad  of  Dead  Ladies,  298 
Ballad  of  Judas  Iscariot,  263 
Ballade  a  la  Lune,  189 
Ballads   and    Sonnets    (Ros- 

setti),  310 
Ballads  of  Irish  Chivalry,  260 
Balzac,  Honore  de,  42 
Bande  Noire,  La,  216 
Banshee  and   Other  Poems, 

The,  261 
Banville,  Theodore  F.  de,  388 
Barante,  P.  A.  P.  B.,  226 
Bards    of  the  Gael  and  the 

Gall,  260 
Basso,  Andrea  de,  1 10 
Baudelaire,  Chas.,  388,  389 
Bax,  E.  B.,  386 
Beata  Beatrix,  291,  303,  310 
Beckford,  Wm.,  367 
Belle  Dame  sans  Merci,  La, 

86,  118,   119,  127,   262,  279, 

303,  307 
Berlioz,  Hector,  180,  181 


f. 


414 


Index. 


Bertrand,  A.,  175,  388 
Beyle,  Henri.     See  Stendhal. 
Biographia  Literaria,  48,  55, 

63,  88,  89 
Bisclaveret,  393 
Blackmore,  Sir  Richard,  269, 

270 
Blake,  Wra.,  99 
Blessed   Damozel,   The,   285, 

301,  308,  311,  343 
Blue  Closet,  The,  305 
Bliithenstaub,  167 
Boccaccio,  Giovanni,  92,  123, 

124 
Bowles,  W.  L.,  55-73 
Bowring,  Sir  Jno.,  248 
Boyd,  Henry,  96.  97 
Boyesen,  H.  H.,  139,  159,  160, 

165 
Brandl,  Alois,   50-55.   75.  77. 

82,  86 
Brentano,  Clemens,  134,  138, 

141,  147,  153,  155,  167,  192, 

247,  400 
Bridal  of  Triermain,  The,  6, 

13,  14 
Bride's    Prelude,   The,    300, 

3" 
Broad  Stone  of  Honour,  The, 

363-66 
Brooke,  Stopford  A.,  261 
Brown,  F.  M.,  389 
Brownie  of    Bodsbeck,  The, 

253 
Browning,  Elizabeth  B.,  277, 

278 
Browning,    Robert,  190,  221, 

276,    277 
Buchanan,  Robert,  263 
Building  of  the  Dream,  The, 

39o.  39i 
Burger,  G.  A.,  83,   133,   144, 

159,  192,  297 
Burgraves,  Les,  226,  299,  396 
Burke,  Edmund,  145 
Burne-Jones,    Edward,     285, 

304.  305,  309.    318-20,    322, 

324,  340 


Byron,  Geo.  Gordon,  Lord,  8, 
9,  26,  53,  60,  65-73,  8.x,  84, 
99-101,  106, 116-18,  171,  192, 
195,  196,  203,  232-34,  246, 
333,  396-98 

Caine,  T.  Hall,  279,  296,  301, 

302,  308 
Calderon  de  la  Barca,  Pedro, 

156,  192,  234,  247 
Calidore,  129 
Callista,  355,  357 
Calverley,  C.  S.,  249 
Campbell,  Thomas,  64-67,  71, 

72 
Cancionero,  The,  246 
Carlyle,  Thos.,  15,  35,  39,  92, 

103,  in,  137,  149,  151,  160, 

162,  164,  168,  171,  335,  381, 

382,  384,  398,  400 
Cary,  Henry  F.,  97-99,  102 
Castle  by  the  Sea,  The,  170 
Castle  of  Otranto,  The,  4,  10 
Cecil  Dreeme,  367 
Chaitivel,  390 
Chartier,  Alain,  118 
Chasse  du  Burgrave,  La,  189, 

277 
Chateaubriand,  F.  A.  de,  90, 

176,  191,  202-08, 225,  246,  363 
Chatterton,  Thos.,  52,  54,  86, 

119,  191,  300 
Chaucer,  Geoffrey,  93,  315-17, 

328,  329 
Cheap  Clothes  and  Nasty,  383 
Chevaliers      de      J  a      Table 

Ronde,  Les,  225 
Childe  Harold,  70,  73,  91,  99, 

233 
Childe  Roland,  276 
Christabel,  14,  27,  49,  53,  54, 

75,  80-85,  126,  296 
Christian  Year,  The,  357,  361 
Christmas  Carol,  A,  343 
Chronicle  of  the  Cid,  236 
Cinq  Mars,  191 
Civil  Wars  of  Granada,  The, 

247 


Index. 


415 


Cloister  and  the  Hearth,  The, 

230,  231 
Coleridge,  S.  T.,  9,  12-14,  27, 

48-63,  74-89,  97-99,  119,  126, 

127,    136-38,    158,    159,   168, 

291,  295-97.  314,  355 
Collins,  J.  Churton,  257,  260 
Collinson,  Jas.,  284,  292,  293 
Colvin,  Sidney,  116,  127 
Conde  Alarcos,  247 
Congal,  260 
Conquete  d'  Angle terre,    La, 

39,  226 
Conservateur  Litteraire,   Le, 

201 
Conspiracy  of  Venice,   The, 

246 
Contes  Bizarres,  167 
Contes  Drolatiques"  42 
Contrasts,  368-71,  375 
Count  Gismond,  276 
Courthope,  W.  J.,  314 
Cowper,  Wm.,  57,  58,  68 
Croker,  T.  C,  253,  256,  258 
Cromwell,  90,  218,  221 
Cross,  W.  L.,  1,  31,  38 

Dante,  Alighieri,  40,  90-113, 

122,   282,   290,  298-301,  310, 

311,  362,  393 
Dante  and  his  Circle,  299,  303 
Dante  at  Verona,  310 
Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti 

(Sharp) ,  291,  292,  306 
Dante's  Dream,  291 
Dark  Ladie,  The,  49,  86 
Dark  Rosaleen,  259 
Dasent,  Sir  Geo.,  334 
Davidson,  Jno.,  263,  264 
Day  Dream,  The,  265-67 
Death  of  Mile,  de  Sombreuil, 

The,  216 
Decameron,    The,    123,    124, 

393.  400 
Defence  of  Guenevere,  The, 

275,  296,  309,  321,  324-28 
Defence  of  Poetry  (Shelley), 

101 


Deirdre,  260 

Dejection  :  an  Ode,  60,  86 
Delacroix,  Eugene,  177,  178 
De  Quincey,  Thos.,  38 
Development  of  the  English 

Novel,  The,  1,  31,  38 
Deveria,  Eugene,  178,  195 
Dialogue  to  the  Memory  of 

Mr.  Alexander  Pope,  402 
Dies  Irse,  5,  153 
Digby,  Kenelm  H.,  319,  363- 

66,  379 
Discourse  of  the  Three  Uni- 
ties, 133 
Divine  Comedy,  The,  92-99, 

102,  103,  105,  109,   m,  282, 

290,  310,  362,  366 
Djinns,  The,  189 
Dobell,  Sydney,  262,  263 
Dobson,  Austin,  401,  402 
Don  Alvaro,  246 
Dondey,  Theophile,  185,  190 
Don  Quixote,  156,  241 
Dream  of  Gerontius,  The,  362 
Dream  of  John  Ball,  The,  386 
Dryden,  Jno.,  117,  124,   125, 

269 
Dues  de  Bourgogne,  Les,  226 
Dumas,  Alexandre,  198,  209 
Diirer,  Albrecht,  152,  153.324. 

373.  374 

Earthly  Paradise,  The,  237, 
238,  315,  321,  328-32,  334. 
380,  390,  391 

Ecclesiologist,  The,  375 

Edda,  The,  334 

Eden  Bower,  315 

Eichendorff,  Joseph  von,  146 

Eighteenth  Century  Vig- 
nettes, 401 

Elfinland  Wud,  254,  255 

Elves,  The,  163 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  165,  166,  307 

Endymion,  121,  126,  128,  342 

English  Bards  and  Scotch  Re- 
viewers, 26,  60,  63,  69,  70, 
72 


416 


Index. 


English   Contemporary  Art, 

293 
Enid,  270,  272 
Epic  and  Romance,  46,  47 
Epic  of  Women,  An,  393 
Epipsychidion,  101,  310 
Erfindung  des  Rosenkranzes, 

Die,  153 
Erl  King,  The,  192 
Erskine,  Wm.,  6,  7,  13 
Espronceda,  Jos6  de,  246 
Essay  on  Epic  Poetry  (Hay- 
ley)  .  95 
Essays    and    Studies  (Swin- 
burne), 349.  35i 
Essays  on  German  Literature 
(Boyesen),    139,    159,    160, 
165 
Essays    on    the    Picturesque 

(Price) ,  34 
Eve  of  St.  Agnes,   The,    85, 

107,  120-22,  125-29,  307 
Eve  of  St.  John,  The,  13,  22, 

23 
Eve  of  St.  Mark,  The,  130,  131 

Faber,  F.  W.,  360,  362 

Faerie  Queene,  The,  120,  275 

Fairies,  The,  258 

Fair  Inez,  279 

Fairy  Legends  of  the  South 

of  Ireland,  253,  256,  258 
Fairy  Thorn,  The,  258 
Familiar  Studies  of  Men  and 

Books,  32 
Fantasio,  226 
Faust,  178,  191,  192,  238 
Feast  of  the  Poets,  The,  108 
Ferguson,  Sir  Samuel,  258-60 
Fichte,  J.  G.,  137 
Fin  du  Classicisme,  La,  175 
Ford,  R.,  246,  248 
Forest  Lovers,  The,  230-32 
Fors  Clavigera,  380,  383,  387 
Fountain  of  Tears,  The,  389 
Fouque\  F.  de  la  M.,  36,  139, 

140,^153,    162,    167-69,  324, 

363,  373 


Fourteen    Sonnets    (Bowles), 

55.  58-61 
Fragments      from      German 

Prose  Writers,  162 
Frere,  Jno.  H.,  248 
From  Shakspere  to  Pope,  116 

Gallery  of  Pigeons,  The,  388. 

394.  395 
Gareth  and  Lynette,  274 
Gaspard  de  la  Nuit,  388 
Gates,  L.  E.,  129,  355,  356 
Gaule  Poetique,  La,  225 
Gautier,  Theophile,  167,  176- 

81,  183-85,  187,  188,  191-93, 

195-98,  202,  219,  221-25,  349. 

388,  393 
Gebir,  235,  237 
Genie  du  Christianisme,  Le, 

90,  176,  202,  203,  205-08,  363 
Gen^Je  Armour,  The,  109,  no 
Germ,  The,  284 
German  Novelists  (Roscoe), 

167 
German    Poets    and   Poetry 

(Longfellow),  167 
German  Romance  (Carlyle), 

162 
Gierusalemme  Liberata,  91 
Girlhood    of     Mary    Virgin, 

The,  287,  290,  291 
Glenfinlas,  13,  22 
Globe,  Le,  201,  202 
Goblet,  The,  164 
Goblin  Market,  The,  82 
Godiva,  265 
Goethe,  Johann  Wolfgang,  5, 

92,  133,  178,  191,  192 
Golden  Legend,  The,  297 
Golden  Treasury,  The,  25,  389 
Golden  Wings,  326-28 
Goldsmith,  Oliver,  95 
Gorres,  Joseph,  138,  147,  152, 

363,  400 
Gosse,  Edmund,  116 
Gotz  von  Berlichingen,  5,  133, 

193 
Gries,  J.  D.,  156,  247 


Index. 


4i7 


Grimm,  Jakob  and  Wm.,  154, 

162,  247,  256 
Guest,  Lady  Charlotte,  270 

Hallam,  Henry,  103,  399 
Han  d'Islande,  196,  218 
Hardiknute,  3 
Harold  the  Dauntless,  29 
Hartleap  Well,  19-21,  80 
Hauptmann,  Gerhart,  245 
Hawker,  R.  S.,  262,  263 
Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  162-64 
Hayley,  Wm.,  95,  96 
Haystack  in  the  Floods,  The, 

326 
Heart  of  Midlothian,  The,  31, 

33,  379 
Heine,  Heinrich,  35-38,  139- 

41,  144,  146-49,  T52,  154-59, 

161,  170,  400 
Heinrich     von    Ofterdinsen. 

164-66  W 

Heir  of  Redcliffe,  The,  357 
Helvellyn,  15,  16 
Henri  III.,  209 
Heretic's  Tragedy,  The,  276 
Hereward  the  Wake,  281 
Herford,  C.  H.,  12,24,  34,  87, 

88 
Hernani,  186,  188,  195-200 
Hero  Worship,  103,  in,  335 
Herzensergiessungen      eines 

kunstliebenden  Klosterbru- 

ders,  152,  153 
Hewlett,  Maurice,  230-32 
Higginson,  T.  W.,  163 
Histoire      du      Romantisme 

(Gautier),    176-81,     183-85, 

187,  188,  191-93,  195-98,  221 

-25 

Histoire  du  Romantisme  en 
France  (Toreinx),  202 

History  of  France  (Michelet), 
226 

History  of  Literature  (Schle- 
gel),  157 

History  of  Spanish  Litera- 
ture, A  (Kelly),  246,  247 

27 


History   of    Spanish    Litera- 
ture,    A.     (Ticknor),    242, 
243,  248 
History  of  the  Crusades,  226 
"History  of  the  Swiss  Confed- 
eration, 153 
Hita,  Perez  de,  247 
Hogg,  Jas.,  250-55 
Holy  Cross  Day,  277 
Homme  qui  Rit.  L\  219,  221 
Hood,  Thos.,  278,  279 
House  of  Life,  The,  307,  310 
House  of  the  Wolfings,  The, 

232,  337-39-  387 
Howells,  W.  D.,  397,  398 
Howitt,  Chas.  and  Mary,  334 
Hughes,  Arthur,  305-07 
Hughes,  Thomas.,  357,  383 
Hugo,  Francois  V.,  222 
Hugo,  Victor  Marie,  90,  137, 
173,    176,    178-82,   188,    189, 
194-96,  200,  214-21,  224,  226, 
247,  277,  298,  299,  349,  388, 

389 
Hunt,  Jas.  Leigh,  49,  105-13, 

118,  119,  121-23,  127,  388 
Hunt,  Wm.  H.,  283,  284,  288- 

90,  292,  302,  306,  307 
Hurd,  Richard,  364 
Hutton,  R.  H.,  40 
Hylas,  331 

Hymns  to  the  Night,  164 
Hypatia,  355 

Hyperion  (Keats),  117,  122 
Hyperion  (Longfellow) ,  172 

Idylls   of    the  King,  268-75, 

303,  347 
Illustrations     of     Tennyson, 

257,  260 
II  Penseroso,  374 
Imitation  of  Spenser  (Keats) , 

120 
Inferno,  96,  99,  103,  191 
Intaglios,  393 
Irving,  Washington,  239 
Isabella,     123-25,     307,     390, 

400 


4i8 


Index. 


Ivanhoe,  31,  36,  39,  40,  43, 
379,  397 

Jameson,  Anna,  374,  375 
Jeffrey,  Francis,  Lord,  37 
Jenny,  309 
John  Inglesant,  357 
Journal  des  Debats,  201 
Journal  of   Speculative  Phi- 
losophy, The,  166 
Journey  into    the  Blue  Dis- 
tance, 162,  163 
Joyce,  P.  W.,  260 
Joyce,  R.  D.,  260 

Keats  (Colvin),  116,  127 

Keats,  Jno.,  53,  54,  82,  85,  86, 
107,  H3-31.  i72.  228,  262, 
264,  279,  287,  294,  299,  300, 
306,  307,  314,  315,  342,  388, 
390,  400 

Keble,  Jno.,  292,  357,  361 

Keith  of  Ravelston,  262,  263 

Kelly,  J.  F.,  246,  247 

Ker,  W.  P.,  46,  47 

Kilmeny,  252 

Kinder    und    Hausmarchen, 

154,  162 

King  Arthur's  Tomb,  327 
Kinges  Quair,  The,  306,  312 
Kingsley,   Chas.,  279-81,  292, 

355,  383,  384 
King's    Tragedy,    The,  306, 

311-13 
Knaben    Wunderhorn,    Des, 

155,  172 

Knight,  Death,  and  the  Devil, 

The,  152,  153,  324,  373 
Knight's  Grave,  The,  87 
Kronenwachter,  Die,  167 
Kubla  Khan,  87 

Lady  of   Shalott,    The,  265, 

271,  303.  304   324 
Lady  of  the  Lake,  The,  19, 

29,  251,  379 
Lament    for    the  Decline  of 

Chivalry,  279 


Lamia,  117,  129 

Landor,  W.  S.,  16,  20,  27,  53, 

54.  117,  235,  237,  395 
Lang,  Andrew,  330 
Lara,  233 

Laus  Veneris,  343,  349 
Lay  of    the   Brown   Rosary, 

The,  277,  278 
Lay    of    the    Last  Minstrel, 

The,  3,  5,  11,  25-28,  40,  53, 

85,  252 
Lays  of  Ancient  Rome,  249 
Lays  of  France,  389,  390 
Lays  of  the  Western  Gael, 

260 
Leading      Cases    done    into 

Equity,  249 
Legends  of  the  Cid,  246 
Lenore,  83,  133,  144,  192,  297, 

392. 
Lerer,  The,  349 
LelRr,  Creuze"  de,  225 
Letters  on  Chivalry  and  Ro- 
mance, 364 
Letters  on  Demonology  and 

Witchcraft,  41 
Lettresde  Dupuiset  Cotonet, 

226 
Lewis,  M.  G.,  77,  83,  238,  239 
Liberal  Movement  in  English 

Literature,  The,  314 
Life    and    Death    of   Jason, 

The,  315,  321,  328-32 
Life    and    Letters    of    Dean 

Church,  The,  358 
Life  of  William  Morris,  The 

(Mackail),    315,    320,    331, 

333,  382 
Light  of  the  World,  The,  288- 

90 
Lindsay,  A.  W.  C,  372-74 
Lines  on  a  Bust  of  Dante,  105 
Literary  Reminiscences  (De 

Quincey),  38 
Literature  and  Romance  of 

Northern  Europe,  334 
Literature    of    Europe,    The 

(Hallam),  103 


Index. 


419 


Lockhart,  J.  G.,  5,  7,  9, 11,  22, 

23,  239,  247,  248 
Locrine,  346 
Longfellow,  H.  W.,  105,*  109, 

164,  167,  170,  172,  239,  297 
Lord  of    the  Isles,  The,  2,9, 

85 
Lorenzaccio,  226 
Lorenzo  and  Isabella,  287,  291 
Loss  and  Gain,  357,  359 
Love,  86,  127 
Love  is  Enough,  332,  333 
Lovers  of  Gudrun,  The,  330, 

334-36 
Lowell,  J.  R.,  70,  82,  93,  116, 

131,  165,  203,  260 
Lucinde,  157 

Luck  of  Edenhall,  The,  170 
Liirlei,  Die,  141 
Lyra  Innocentium,  357 
Lyrical  Ballads,  18,  48,  74 

Mabinogion,  The,  270,  332 
Macaulay,  T.  B.,  103,  249 
Mackail,  W.  J.,  315,  320,  331, 

333.  382 
McLaughlin,  E.  T.,  43 
Madoc,  237 

Mador  of  the  Moor,  251 
Maeterlinck,  Maurice,  326 
Maidens  of  Verdun,  The,  216 
Maids    of    Elfin-Mere,    The, 

258,  304,  324 
Maigron,  L.,  33,  34,  44-46 
Mallet,  P.  H.,  107,  229 
Malory,  Sir  Thos.,   270,  272, 

303,  347,  348 
Manfred,  234 
Mangan,  J.  C.,  259,  260 
Manzoni,  Alessandro,  133 
Marchen  (Tieck) ,  162 
Marie  de  France,  390,  393 
Marienlieder,  148 
Marino  Faliero,  234 
Marion  Delorme,  200 
Marmion,  6,  15,  23,  29,  40,  90, 

379 
Martyrs,  Les,  225 


Marzials,  Theophile,  285,  387, 

388,  394,  395 
Masque  of    Queen    Bersabe, 

The,  277,  344 
Masque    of    Shadows,    The, 

390,  392 
Meinhold,  J.  W.,  42,  280 
M6rimee,  Prosper,  30,  33 
Michaud,  J.  F.,  226 
Michelet,  Jules,  226 
Middle  Ages,  The  (Hallam) , 

103 
Millais,    J.    E.,    283-85,   287, 

288,  290,  291,  307 
Milton,  J  no.,  93,  103,  269,  374 
Minstrelsy,  Ancient  and  Mod- 
ern (Motherwell),  253 
Minstrelsy    of    the    Scottish 

Border,   21,  22,  24.  26,  243, 

250,  251 
Modern  Painters,  6,   10,  284, 

292,  294 
Mores  Catholici,  319,  366 
Morgante  Maggiore,  234 
Morris,    Wm.,    29,    232,    237, 

275,    285,  296,  304-06,  309, 

314-40,   345,  350,   380,   382, 

384-89 
Morte  Darthur  (Malory) ,  106, 

270,  273,  303,  304,  324,  347, 

364 
Morte  d' Arthur  (Tennyson), 

271,  272 

Motherwell,  Wm.,  250,  253-55 
Mozley,  T.,  358 
Miiller,  Johannes,  153 
Munera  Pulveris,  380 
Muse  Francaise,  La,  201 
Music  Master,  The,  258,  300 
Musset,  Alfred  de,   180,   189, 

198,  226,  247 
Myller,  H.,  154 
Mysteries  of  Udolpho,  83 

Nanteuil,  Celestin,  178,  223- 

25 
Nature  of  Gothic,  The,  321, 

375.  385,  386 


420 


Index. 


Nerval,     Gerard    de,    190-92, 

196,  197,  225,  349 
New  Essays  toward  a  Critical 

Method,  122 
Newman,    J.    H.,    292,    319, 

354-62,  366,  381 
News    from    Nowhere,    317, 

319,  382,  386 
Nibelungenhed.The,  154,  155, 

297 
Nodier,  Chas.,  194 
Northern  Antiquities,  107,  229 
Northern  Mythology,  334 
Ndtre   Dame  de   Paris,    178, 

179,  221,  224 

Novalis,  134,  137,  148,  152, 
164-67,  172,  302,  400 

Ode  to  a  Dead  Body,  no 
Ode  to  a  Grecian  Urn,  117 
Ode  to  the  West  Wind,  102 
Odes et  Ballades  (Hugo),  176, 

180,  189,  217 

Odes    et     Poesies     Diverses 

(Hugo),  214 
Odyssey,  The,  331 
Ogier  the  Dane,  330,  332 
Old  Celtic  Romances,  260 
Old  Masters  at  Florence,  316 
Old    Mortality,    31,   33,    253, 

379 

Old  Woman  of  Berkeley,  The, 
238,  239 

Oliphant,  F.,  353 

On  First  Looking  into  Chap- 
man's Homer,  117.  122 

Oriana,  265,  313,  324 

Orientales,  Les,  189 

Orlando  Furioso,  90,  91,  109 

O'Shaughnessy,  Arthur,  387- 
90,  393 

Ossian,  208,  261 

Palgrave,  F.  T.,  25,  389 
Palmerin  of  England,  236,  241 
Paradiso,  311 

Parochial  and  Plain  Sermons, 
360 


Parsons,  T.  W.,  105 
Partenopex  of  Blois,  90 
Past  and  Present,  381,  382 
Pater,  Walter,  42,  79 
Payne,  Jno.,  387-93 
Perrault,  Chas.,  194,  265,  349 
Percy,    Thos.,   3,   54,    57,  74, 

159,  238,  295 
Petrarca,  Francesco,  92 
Phantasus,  160 
Pillar  of  the  Cloud,  The,  362 
Poe,  Edgar  A.,  162,  163,  300, 

301.  389 
Poems    and    Ballads    (Swin- 
burne),  296,  339,  343,  345, 
349,  35o 
Poems  and   Romances  (Sim- 
cox),  388 
Poems  by  the  Way,  386 
Poets  and  Poetry  of  Munster, 

259 
Politics  for  the  People,  383 
Pollock,  Sir  Frederick,  249 
Pope,   Alexander,    52-54,    56, 

63-73,  1 1 5-17,  402 
Portrait,  The,  311 
Praeterita,  372.  378 
Preface  to  Cromwell,  182,  188, 

218-20 
Pre-Raphaelitism    (Ruskin), 

293 
Price,  Sir  Uvedale,  34,  374 
Primer  of  French  Literature, 

A,  183,  184 
Prince  Arthur    (Blackmore), 

270 
Prince  des  Sots,  Le,  225 
Princess,  The,  267,  268 
Prior,  Matthew,  401 
Prophecy  of  Dante,  The,  100, 

101 
Proverbs  in  Porcelain,  401 
Psyche,  121  - 
Pugin,  A.  C,  368 
Pugin,   A.   W.   N.,   360,   361, 

368-72,  375,  379 
Pugin,  E.  W.,  368 
Purgatorio,  362 


Index. 


421 


Queen  Gwynnevar's  Round, 

262 
Queenhoo  Hall,  8,  20,  32 
Queen  Mab,  235 
Queen's    Wake,     The,    252, 

253 

Quentin  Durward,  31,  36  * 
Quest  of  the  Sancgreall,  The 

(Westwood),  276 
Quest  of  the  Sangreal,  The 

(Hawker),  262 
Quiberon,  216 

Racine  et  Shakspere,  38,  186, 

208,  211,  213  - 

Radcliffe,    Anne,   41,  42,  8# 

193 
Rapunzel,  309,  326,  327 
Raven,  The,  301 
Reade,  Chas.,  230 
Rebecca  and  Rowena,  397 
Recits  Merovingiens,  226 
Recollections  of  D.  G.  Ros- 

setti  (Caine),  296,  297,  301, 

302,  308 
Reliques  of  Ancient  English 

Poetry,  3,   17,  74,   107,  229, 

238,  243,  247 
Reminiscences  (Mozley),  358 
Remorse,  86,  89 
Richter,  J.  P.  F.,  169 
Rime  of   Redemption,   The, 

392 
Rime  of  the  Duchess  May, 

The,  277,  278 
Rivas,  Duke  de,  246 
Robertson,  J.  M.,  122 
Rogers,  Chas.,  96 
Roi  s' Amuse,  Le,  200,  201 
Rokeby,  29 
Romancero     General,     The, 

243.  247 
Roman    Historique,    Le,  33, 

34,  44-46 
Romantische      Schule,      Die 

(Heine),  36,  139-41 
Romaunt  of  the  Page,  The, 

277 


Roots  of  the  Mountains,  The, 

337,  338 
Rosa,  Martinez  de  la,  246 
Rosamond,  346,  347 
Rosamund,     Queen    of    the 

Goths,  346 
Roscoe,  Wm.,  65,  66 
Rose,  W.  S.,  90 
Rose  Mary,  263,  311,  312 
Rossetti,    Christina,  82,   282, 

284,  302 
Rossetti,  D.  G.,  131,  228,  258, 

262,  263,  265,  282-88,  290-92, 

295-3x5,    318-21,    323,    324, 

340,    343,    345,  350,   387-89, 

393 
Rossetti,  Gabriele,  282 
Rossetti,  Maria  F.,  282 
Rossetti,  W.  M.,  282,  284 
Runenberg,  The,  163 
Ruskin,  Jno.,  6,  10,  284,  286- 

89,    292-94,   304,    317,    321, 

324,  371,  372,  375-8o,  382-87, 

398 

Sacred  and   Legendary  Art, 

374,  375 
Saint  Agnes,  267 
Saint  Brandan,  263 
Saint  Dorothy,  344 
Saint    Patrick's     Purgatory, 

238 
Saintsbury,  George,  50,  118, 

183.  184,  295,  324,  326,  395, 

396 
Saints'    Tragedy,    The,    279, 

280,  292 
Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  und 

die    Englische    Romantik, 

50-55,  75,  77,  82,  86 
Scherer,  Wm.,  167,  170 
Schiller,  J.  C.  F.,  210,  212 
Schlegel,  A.  W.,  88,  140,  144, 

145,    154,   156-59,    l62,    165. 

172,  192,  247 
Schlegel,  F.,99,  134,  135,  137. 

148,    151,    157-59,  172,   247, 

363 


42  2 


Index. 


Sctot,  Sir  Walter,  1-47,  49, 
50,  52.  53.  7i,  75,  77,  85,  87, 
88,  90,  91,  119,  120,  127,  129, 
136,  158,  167,  169,  172,  173, 
178,  180,  192,  212,  226,  232, 
243,  246,  247,  249-53,  256, 
267,  295,  313,  320,  321,  323, 
329,  352-56,  367,  378,  379, 
397,  402 

Scott,  W.  B.,  292,  293,  305-07, 
353,  389 

Selections  from  Newman,  355, 
356 

Seward,  Anne,  98 

Shairp,  J.  C,  18 

Shaker  Bridal,  The,  164 

Shakspere.Wm.,  210,  222,  399 

Sharp,  Wm.,  291,  292,  306 

Shelley,  P.  B.,  8,  25,  101,  102, 
120,  232-35,  299,  310,  340, 
398 

Short  History  of  English  Lit- 
erature, A,  50,  118,  295,  324, 
326,  395,  396 

Shorthouse,  J.  H.,  357 

Short  Studies  (Higginson), 
163 

Sigerson,  Jno.,  259,  261 

Sigismonda  and  Guiscardo, 
124,  125 

Sigurd  the  Volsung,  336 

Simcox,  G.  A.,  388 

Sintram  and  his  Companions, 
153,  162,  168,  324,  373 

Sir  Floris,  390-92 

Sir  Galahad  (Morris),  306, 
325,  328 

Sir  Galahad  (Tennyson) , 
267,  271,  325 

Sir  Lancelot  and  Queen  Gui- 
nivere,  271,  325 

Sir  Tristram,  7 

Sister  Helen,  311,  312,  345 

Sisters,  The,  265,  313 

Sizeranne,  R.  de  la,  293 

Sketches    of    Christian    Art, 

372-74 
Sleep  and  Poetry,  1 14-16 


Sleeping  Beauty,  The,  265 
Smith,  Charlotte,  55 
Socialism,  386 

Song  at  the  Feast  of  Brough- 
am Castle,  18,  19 
Song  of  the  Western  Men,  262 
Sonneur  de  Saint  Paul,  Le, 

193 
Sorrows  of  Werther,  The,  397 
Southey,  Robert,    50,   51,    55, 

71,  235-39,  355 
Specimen  of  an  Induction  to 

a  Poem,  129 
Specimens    of    German    Ro- 
mance, 167 
Specimens  of  Gothic  Archi- 
tecture, 368 
Spenser,    Edmund,   3,  4,  93, 

107,  120-22,  269,  275,  329  * 
Stael,  Mine,  de,  134, T39,  141- 

45,  171,  192,  208 
Staff  and  Scrip,  311 
Stedman,  E.  C.,  265,  387 
Stendhal,  De,  36-38,  186,  187, 

201,  208-14 
Stephen,  Leslie,  10,  38,  80 
Sternbald's      Wanderungen, 

152 
Stevenson,  R.  L.,  32 
Stokes,  Whitley,  259,  261 
Stolberg,   F.   L.,  Count,   149, 

363 
Stones  of  Venice,  321,  375-79, 

385.  386 
Stories  from  the  Italian  Poets, 

109-11 
Story  of  Rimini,  The,  105-07, 

119,  121,  122,  390 
Story  of  the  Brave  Casper  and 

the  Fair  Annerl,  The,  167 
Student  of  Salamanca,  The, 

246 
Studies    and    Appreciations, 

129 
Studies  in  Mediaeval  Life  and 

Literature,  43 
Study  of    Celtic    Literature, 

On  the,  256 


Index. 


423 


Succube,  La,  42 

Sundering  Flood,   The,   232, 

337,  339 
Swinburne,   A.   C,  275,  276, 
296,  304,  309,  314,  315,  319, 
339-51.  387-89 

Table  Talk  (Coleridge) ,  12 
Tables  Turned,  The,  386 
Tale  of  Balen,  The,  347,  348 
Tale  of  King  Constans,  The, 

330 
Tales  of  Wonder,  238 
Talisman,  The,  28,  36,  43 
Tannhauser,    153,    160,    264, 

343,  39i 
Task,  The,  58 

Tasso,  Torquato,  91,  104,  109 
Taylor,  Edgar,  162 
Taylor,  Wm.,  53,  162,  238 
Templars  in  Cyprus,  The,  149 
Tennyson,  Alfred,    257,   260, 

262,    264-75,   295,   303,   324, 

325,  347.  348 
Thackeray,   W.  M.,  397,  398, 

402 
Thalaba  the  Destroyer,  235 
Theocritus,  331 
Thierry,    Augustin,    39,    225, 

226 
Thomas  the  Rhymer,  7 
Thoreau.  H.  D.,  165 
Thorpe,  Benjamin,  334 
Thousand  and  One  Nights, 

The,  393 
Three  Bardic  Tales,  259 
Three  Fishers,  The,  383 
Thyrsis,  378 

Ticknor,  Geo.,  242,243,  248 
Tieck,   Ludwig,  42,  134,  137, 

148,    150,  152,    154,   156-65, 

172,  245,  400 
Tighe,  Mary,  121 
Tintern' Abbey,  358 
Todhunter,  Jno.,  259.  261 
Tom  Brown  at  Oxford,  357 
Tracts    for    the    Times,  292, 

319,  363,  368 


Treasury  of  Irish  Poetry,  A, 
261 

Tristram  and  Iseult  (Arnold) , 
275,  278,  341 

Tristram  of  Lyonesse  (Swin- 
burne), 275.  340 

Tristram  und  Isolde  (Wag- 
ner), 393 

Troy  Town,  315 

True  Principles  of  Pointed 
Architecture,  The,  372 

Tune  of  Seven  Towers,  The, 
305,  326 

Two  Foscari,  The,  234 

Uhland,  Ludwig,  140,  154-56, 

170,  171 
Ulalume,  301 
Undine,  168 
Unto  this  Last,  380 

Vabre,  Jule,  222 

Vanity  Fair,  396 

Vathek,  367 

Vere,   Aubrey  de,    259,   260, 

358,  361,  366 
Verses  on  Various  Occasions 

(Newman),  357 
Versunkene  Glocke,  Die,  245 
Victorian  Poets,  265,  387 
Vignettes  in  Rhyme,  401 
Vigny,  A.  V.,  Comte  de,  188, 

191,  210 
Villon,    Francois,    298,    299, 

350,  393 
Vision  of  Judgment,  The,  70 
Vita  Nuova,  La,  101,  299,  302. 

310.  393 
Volksmarchen  (Tieck),  160 
Volsunga  Saga,  The,  334,  335 
Voltaire,  F.  M.  A.  de,  92,  94, 

95 
Vorlesungen      uber     drama- 

tische  Kunst  und  Litteratur 

(Schlegel),  88,  158,  162,  192 
Voss,  J.  H.,  149 
Voyage   of    Maeldune,  The, 

260 


424 


Index. 


Wackenroder,    W.    H.,    134, 

152,  153,  159 
Wagner,    Richard,    153,   264, 

39i.  393 
Walladmor,  38 
Walter  Scott  et  la  Princesse 

de  Cleves,  36 
Ward,  W.  G.,  360 
Warton,    Joseph,    61,   63,  64, 

fh  73,  157.  158 
Warton,  Thos.,  27,  57,  60,  61, 

94,  157.  158 
Water  Lady,  The,  279 
Water  of  the  Wondrous  Isles, 

The,  337,  339 
Watts,  Theodore,  300 
Waverley  Novels,  The,  30-39, 

324.  378,  379.  403 
Welland  River,  328,  345 
Welshmen  of  Tirawley,  The, 

260 
Werner,   Zacharias,   148,  149, 

212,  302 
Westwood,  Thos.,  276 
White  Doe  of  Rylstone,  The, 

16-18 
White  Ship,  The,  311,  312 


William    George    Ward    and 

the  Oxford  Movement,  361 
Winthrop,  Theodore,  367 
Wisdom    and  Languages  of 

India,  The,  157 
Wissenschaftslehre  (Fichte) , 

137 
Witch  of  Fife,  The.  252 
Wood  beyond  the  World,  The, 

337.  339 

Woolner,  Thos.,  284 

Wordsworth,  Wm.,  9,  12,  14- 
20,  48,  50-55.  7i.  77.  80  89, 
119,  300,  333,  355,  358,  398 

Yarrow  Revisited,  14 
Yeast,  383 
Yeats,  \jjf.  B.,  261 
Yonge,  Charlotte  M.,  357 
Yuletide  Stories,  334 


Zapolya,  89 
Zauberring,  Der,  168 
Zeitung  fur  Einsiedler, 

172 
Zorrilla,  Jose  de,  246 


138. 


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